THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
" GOD is the supreme servant of men who want to get on, to produce. Providence. The provider. The heavenly store- keeper. The everlasting Wanamaker." So Lorenzo at his most Laurentian, condemning the resourceful, industrious apprentice who was not only a prophet and a maker of the modern world of machinery, science, law and order which Lawrence despised, but who, more candid than most prophets of that world, even extended his principles to the sacred realm of passion, the body, or, as Franklin put it in his unromantic way, to venery.
A few years ago, the idea of Franklin as hero would have seemed absurd to all but the most mercenary or business-minded. Common sense, moderation, prudential assessment of emotional as well as cash income and expenditure, these seem less despicable qualities than they did ten or fifteen years ago—as they have become scarcer. They are less drab and dreary in a world provided with a fresh Calas case a day, a world in which the Berlin of Voltaire and Frederick seems so humane and tolerable compared with the Berlin of Herr Hitler and Dr. Rosenberg. We are less likely to laugh at the complacent assessment of the life of his hero that James Parton made seventy years ago. " A life like Franklin's solves the problem stated in the Faust of Goethe ; which is how shall a man become satisfied with his life? "
The new interest in this attitude ; the longing for a world in which such lives could be lived, worlds in which " life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness " could be proclaimed as the axiomatic objects of the State in part accounts for and in part justifies the appearance of two lives of Franklin within a few weeks of each other. It must be said, at the start, that the two lives are of very different character. Mr. Van Doren's represents many years of research (and reflection) on the problems raised by Franklin's very varied career and by his far from simple character. Mr. Scudder's book does not suggest a very profound knowledge of the epoch and his frequent carelessness in detail and the oddly uneven biblio- graphy he puts at the end of his book seriously limit the usefulness of his lively narrative. By the standards of this age, his is not at all a bad specimen of the popular biography, and, had Mr. Van Doren not entered the field, Mr. Scudder's book could have been commended more warmly than it is now easy to do. Its competitive merits seem to be two: it is less than half the length of Mr. Van Doren's book, and it is written with a determined liveliness that Mr. Van Doren has avoided.
With Mr. Van Doren we arc in a different world of style and scholarship. Perhaps no man except Franklin (or his successor as American minister to France, Jefferson) could be versatile enough to cover all aspects of Franklin's life equally welL Scientist and journalist, printer and politician, maker and symbol of a new political order, great diplomat and delight of the salons, Franklin's long life is one almost uninterrupted success story. On every aspect of this life, Mr. Van Doren is full, critical and acute. But if one Franklin more than another wins his heart and those of his readers, it is the man who made and kept so many friends, men and women, who lived his own life without any self-righteousness, and who, brought up as a prentice-boy in Boston, was to be a power in America, England and France, and the delight of good society in Paris and Philadelphia, if not in snobbish London. Franklin, too often represented as a mere hero after the heart of Samuel Smiles, was the man who, half-way along the road of life, abandoned money-making (which in any case he had never allowed to dominate his life) and turned to science, politics, literature, companionship. Having achieved a competence, Franklin was free to choose his activities, as far as his sense of duty allowed him.
That sense of duty, although powerful, was not pedantic or troubling. His eye had no difficulty in finding the right road, the " via smarrita " was to be trodden by such ill-balanced souls as John Adams. Franklin knew what was involved in being a good citizen of Pennsylvania, of the British Empire, of the world. He was an astute and, in what he thought the good cause, not a pedantically scrupulous rolitician. In London, he protested against the Stamp Act, characteristically, once it was law, got what were thought
to be good jobs as stamp distributors for his friends. He deprecated violence and revolutionary means, but, once the die was cast, he was as blandly radical and efficient in destroying the British Empire as he would have been adroit and far- seeing in preserving it, had the politicians of the time per- mitted -him to be. But the aristocratic and royal masters of the British Empire did not know how to use this bourgeois of genius. They had more use for that Scots lawyer on the make, Alexander Wedderbum, who, in his famous attack on the agent of the Massachusetts Assembly, talked of Franklin as one who allowed himself to " slide into the language of the minister of a foreign independent State." Franklin made no reply, but he put aside the coat he wore that day and did not put it on again till the day when he signed the treaty of alliance with the minister of the Most Christian King and again put it aside until he signed the peace made between the United States of America and King George III.
In history, in the usual sense of the term, Franklin's greatest achievement was his French mission. It is doubtful if even Washington was as indispensable to the American cause as Franklin. He enjoyed France and the French; he had no Yankee moral superiority to shed, as the scandalised Mrs. Adams noted ; he was as astute and prudent an envoy as ever any nation had. And it was not only Vergennes or the kind ladies of Passy who appreciated him. He was, and knew that he was, a great symbolic figure. When at last he and Voltaire met it was the meeting of Solon and of Sophocles the dazzled spectators thought—and if we, today, cannot quite see Sophocles, we can see Solon. The fur cap, the general air of Quaker benevolence, the reputation as a man of science, the eminent fitness of such a man to represent the new ideal Republic across the Atlantic, combined to make Franklin the perfect emissary of America to the France that was preparing the Federation and the Rights of Man. It is true he was not a Quaker (he was not really, it may be suggested, a Presbyterian either), but what did that matter? Had not Turgot written eripuir coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis or something like it? And so the head of the greatest of European monarchies was induced to aid rebels against a brother monarch and to prepare his own doom.
But this was not all Franklin, even in Paris. He played the harmonica he had invented and foresaw the sophistication of the Scottish airs he loved as if he had been a contemporary of Miss Maxine Sullivan instead of Bach and Haydn. He studied with an endless curiosity and ingenuity the great works of Nature and went home, in extreme old age, to help to make a new constitution. In a sudden flash of religious feeling Franklin had written in one of his treatises on electricity of " adoring that wisdom which had made all things by weight and measure." It was a happy age when men could hope to extend to society the rational laws of Nature and of Nature's God. To a most representative figure of that age Mr. Van Doren has provided a guide as marked by weight, measure and literary art as Franklin himself could have desired.
D. W. BROGAN.
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