Arts and Letters

Gamaliel Bradford was chosen a member of this Academy at its annual meeting on November 12, 1931, but, because of illness which prevented his traveling, he never occupied the seat to which he was elected. He died on April 11, 1932, at Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, in the house where he had lived almost continuously since 1866 and under the shelter of which his literary laurels were won.

He stood by direct descent in the eighth generation from Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony, whose grandson Honorable Gamaliel Bradford (1704-1778) bore the Christian name which was to be held seven times in succession. From his father, a banker, and also a protagonist of political reform, he inherited ardor and considerable keen facial resemblance. From his mother, Clara Crowninshield Kinsman of Newburyport, besides her sensitiveness to beauty, the physical frailty which suffered him to attain just short of three score years and ten only by the most steadfast of regimes and rigorous eliminations. His mother died of consumption at the age of 29 and his own delicacy was so obvious that, to give him every chance against the New England climate, some of his winters were spent in Washington, and, when he was fifteen, one whole year in Europe. From the latter dates the beginning of his thorough knowledge of French, German, and Italian which broadened the horizon of his intensive studies of human character, and incidentally provided the cue to his own method. For in his essay Psychography, which opens his volume A Naturalist of Souls, he quotes from Sainte-Beuve, with whom he was more deeply imbued than by any analyst, the formula “J'analyse, j'herborise, je suis un naturaliste des esprits.”

It was of his own soul that Gamaliel Bradford was first of all a searcher from youth upwards. When possessed by illusion, he was honest to the core in owning it to be delusion if on further scrutiny he was so convinced. He was continually asking questions of himself while considering his problems. He had a constitutional tolerance which enabled him, as his sonnet to Sainte-Beuve brings out, to “pray with saints yet press the sinner's hand.” Though blessed with sanity and a financial competence inherited from his mother, he could turn the shield and murmur "I sometimes wish I had the courage and the character to be a rebel myself." The wistfulness in this instance was à propos of Thomas Paine, the rebel; but on the threshold of his career the same capacity to sympathize with both sides is illustrated by his confession in Saints and Sinners, the book published on the eve of his death. He was writing of St. Francis d'Assisi, and the context runs:

"When I was twenty and was engaged to be married, my love and I came to see the world for the time something as Saint Francis saw it. We, too, felt that we should give up luxury and wanting, should discard the comforting equipment of material life, to which we were accustomed, but of which so many millions were destitute, and adopt voluntary poverty for the good of the world and our own souls. As a letter of that time expresses it: 'We should give up everything, live not only simply, but in poverty, with the poorest of clothes and the simplest of food, giving up everything material, everything tending to outward things, not because we want to be ascetic, but because we will have nothing to draw us from the life within and because we want to set an example of forgetting all the luxuries and comforts of the body. We want to build a little house somewhere, perfectly plain and poor, and live there in every way just as peasants would live.'

“We were twenty, and simple, and foolish. Our parents and relatives and friends ridiculed us and scolded us and reasoned with us, and in the end forced us to let our ideals go—for better, for worse?—I wonder." …

It has been well written since Bradford's death that his "whole life was the triumph of a brilliant intellect over a frail body.'' He himself has set down that he “was educated by ill health, by a vagrant imagination and by vast, vague, and utterly erratic reading.” It is true that he was forced by lack of vitality to withdraw from Harvard at the end of the third week of his Freshman year, and that though his soul was in study and creative writing, he tried for a while to interest himself in his father's business. But his natural bent overcame all obstacles, and after a marriage to the girl of his heart, whom he had known from childhood, he settled down within the limits of tastes which they had in common to a life of letters. Although this decision continued forever to isolate him from the world of surface affairs, the quality of his tastes bore witness to the truth of Shakespeare's warning: "Keep up your bright swords, or the dew will rust them." He was devoted to music and no mean performer; he followed with zest in the company of his neighbors the beauties of nature and the literature of all ages; it was out of his weekly habit of reading with a group of friends the plays of the great dramatists and discussing them that the power of disintegrating character which made him famous was conceived.

Spirits are not finely touched but to fine issues. His was a "fight for glory," as he has himself recorded with peculiar frankness. Recognition was slow in coming. He wrote many poems, eight novels, of which three were published and five rejected. Turning to playwriting, he completed some fifteen plays. Of these one was printed, but not a single one produced. "My creative work," he wrote, "has failed from my utter lack of contact with the surface of life." Yet he could sing valiantly:

My prose is for others,
My songs for myself.
The slow dust that smothers
My Poems on the shelf
Inflicts on my haughty
And insolent nerves
The treatment such naughty
Exposure deserves.

My prose is decorous,
Or strips other men,
Discreetly sonorous
On things that have been.
My verse tears the curtain
From shuddering me,
Pale, haggard, uncertain,
As souls should not be.

My prose is large, sunny,
And pleasant to touch;
It brings me some money,
Though, damn it, not much.
My verse bares my pocket
As well as my heart;
Yet, love it, or mock it,
To sing is my art.

When success arrived with the appearance in 1912 of Lee, the American, he was fifty years old. This biography not only brought him fame, but determined the course of his subsequent output. With but three exceptions, Mr. Bradford for the remaining twenty years of his life kept ardently, if a little unwillingly, to the field of what he chose to call psychography. He had found an eager and loyal public, and its applause was a stimulus to the production of that gallery of portraits— more than a hundred in all—which followed. There was no affectation in what he wrote to a friend as late as 1928: "I do envy you, though, your work of direct creation. I like to tell myself at more enthusiastic moments, that there is a certain element of creation in what I do. But there is a lot of pure drudgery that has to go with it that I do not much care for. What I revel in is the pure joy of making characters out of my brain; but, alas, I never have been able to make one that others reveled in at all. I wish I knew how you do it. If I did, I would never do anything else."

With more conviction another passage written to the same friend less than a year before his death sets in relief both his enthusiasm and his own conception of his aim. "This fascinating problem and puzzle of human nature! I am plunging into it more deeply than ever with the book upon which I am perhaps most rashly embarking, Saints and Sinners, a collection of extreme types of vice and virtue, from which I am trying to distil the essential humanness common to all of us. I have already done Caesar Borgia and Saint Francis and am just now entirely absorbed with Talleyrand, meaning to follow him with à Kempis, Fenelon, Casanova, and Byron. You see what a precious, delicious medley, and I am so wickedly, or curiously, organized that I find one lot about as fascinating as the other. I only wish I had more life and strength for tackling them."

Bradford was able to compress into a single paragraph the tolerant, dispassionate yet ever exacting attitude of mind which brought him an increasing host of grateful readers: "The art of the psychographer," so he writes, "is to disentangle the habits which combine to make character from the immaterial, unessential matter of biography, to illustrate by touches of speech and action that are significant, and by those alone, and thus to burn them into the attention of the reader, not by any means as a final or unchangeable verdict, but as something that cannot be changed without vigorous thinking on the part of the reader himself." He had won the affection of the South by his understanding portrayal of the personages of the Civil War. By the gallery of world figures contributed subsequently he secured international attention which was at its height when he died. His own blithe response to success must not overshadow, however, the wide erudition, thoroughness, and exacting judgment which controlled every word he published. Nor can one exaggerate the patient disability under which he worked or the self-imposed power of concentration which kept him master of his forces. For periods all of his work was done in bed. His actual writing day under favorable conditions was never more than two hours, and during spells of fatigue and sleeplessness would be ten or fifteen minutes. Yet so ably did he husband his strength that he studied his subjects in the intervals, so could write rapidly at the typewriter,—for he rarely used a pen,—with the result that he never revised and seldom cancelled a word.

That Bradford had kinship with Sainte-Beuve and Lytton Strachey both in his purpose and method is hardly to be gainsaid. Though this has been too much dwelt on, it is to be remembered that he acknowledged his debt to the former by copious references in his notes to the authority of the great French critic, and that he dedicated his Daughters of Eve to his brilliant English contemporary. But though the vein was similar, his individuality is readily distinguished. Bradford was neither a cynic and bitter, nor was he a devastating satirist. Ironic he could be, if either his sense of justice or standard of values were offended, but it was the irony of one seeking to qualify, not to overwhelm, and his pen though diamond-pointed had no barb.

This almost Janus-like quality of open-mindedness, often conveyed at the end of his psychographs by a wistful epigram of extenuation of the lost or defeated soul, was just as noticeable when one talked with him. He was a most delightful companion, fluent of speech and never without an opinion, but always tolerant of what others thought, as if he were eager to own that when the best was said for what passed for truth life still remained a puzzle. This temper of mind radiated too a gaiety which lying always just below the surface welcomed the opportunity to become sparkling merriment in congenial company.

It was significant too that one whose body was so frail should have such zest in life. He was intensely engrossed by the why and wherefore of the creature man and by his own ego which aspired to know. Orthodox explanations of the future were never for him infallible. As late as 1924 he wrote:

"Meantime, the world, as I see it, seems to me to need desperately some form of religion; but I am in no position to suggest one, having none of my own. I have groped and wandered through years of vague speculation and have finally abandoned the abstract for the passionate study of concrete individualities, which are inexhaustible in interest and charm. The only inconvenience is that one has, after all, an individuality of one's own, which will not be wholly nor always appeased by the objective, but cries out most inconveniently for some solution of the eternal problems. And no solution comes." It was characteristic, however, of the intensity which kept him so young in heart that he should express the wish for parts of Adonais to be read at his funeral. Who among the mourners filling the little chapel but felt these immortal stanzas to be singularly appropriate to the inquiring spirit that had passed:

Peace, peace! He is not dead, he doth not sleep!
He hath awakened from the dream of life.

*

He has outsoared the shadow of our night.
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again.
From the contagion of the world's slow stain.
He is secure:

*

He lives, he wakes—'tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais—thou young Dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone!

*

He is made one with Nature. There is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird.