B 0 0 K S .
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.*
Tun Franklin literature, already extremely voluminous, and culminating in the authoritative and monumental edition of his writings prepared by the late Mr. Albert H. Smyth, has received a valuable addition in these two massive volumes. Mr. Bruce's method has been to treat Franklin's Ramer in separate chapters on the different provinces into which it may be divided—as a man of business, a statesman, a man of science, and a writer.. These form the second volume. The first is devoted to a series of monographs on Franklin's moral standing and system, his religious beliefs, his philanthropy and civic virtues, family relations, American, British, and French friends. This method has its . merits in enabling Us to form an estimate of a man who impresses us by his astonishing versatility and abundance of mind, but it involves a good deal of overlapping and repetition and many fresh starts. The arrange- ment of the book is open to criticism, and we are inclined to recom- mend readers to begin with the second volume. But there can be' no doubt as to the abiding interest of the contents. These volumes form a sort of Franklin Cyclopaedia in which no aspect of his many- sided genius is overlooked. Mr. Bruce brings immense industry to his task ; he writes with good fe3ling and a pleasant sense of humour ; his exhaustive knowledge of Franklin's writings is at all points fortified by collateral information. He is an enthusiast, but far from being an idolater. Franklin's great services to his country and humanity are duly set forth, but his latest biographer never abandons the judicial attitude laid down in his Introduction. "It is no exaggeration," he observes, "to say that his intellect was an organ lacking in no element of power except that which can be supplied by a profound spiritual insight and a kindling imagination alone." Having earned the most remarkable consensus of admiration received by any man of his time, Franklin went a long way to write himself clown in his own Autobiography, by the unflinching candour with which he exposed the squalors and excesses of his early struggling years. These frank confessions were doubtless intended to serve a.s a warning to others, but they reveal a certain coarseness of fibre which distresses the hero-worshipper. "To that period," as Mr. Bruce puts it, "belong some things that the self-revelation of the Autobiography, unselfish as it is, cannot dignify, or even redeem from moral squalor, and other things which even the frankness of the Autobiography is not frank enough to disclose." He wrote pamphlets condemning slavery while he traded in negroes. That is perhaps the worst blot on the character of an essentially humane man. His sexual morality, as Mr. Bruce puts it, "was no better than the Europe of the eighteenth century ; distinctly worse than the America of that century. His domestic affections were uncommonly. strong, but the notable peculiarity about his domestic life is that he was not a whit less soberly dutiful in his irregular than his regular family connexions, and always acted as if the nuptial ceremony was a wholly superfluous form, so far as a proper sense of marital or paternal obligations, or the existence of deep unreserved affection, upon the part of a husband or a father, went." His general character for probity and integrity is attested on all sides. Even Lord North is credited with the statement that in his belief he was the only man in France whese hands were not stained with stock - jobbery. Of his conduct in the much-discussed episode of the Hutchinson Letters Mr. Bruce takes a more favourable view than Mr. Doyle in the Cambridge History ; but Mr. Doyle, while denying Franklin a delicate sense of honour, admits that his associates in the Massachusetts Assembly were the real culprits, and that Wedderburn's attack on him before the Privy Council was outrageously violent as well as impolitic. But Mr. Bruce gives good reasons for believing that Franklin was not converted from England's friend to her enemy by this speech. All through his life he was slow to anger. lip to the very last he was regarded as too Pro-English by the American extremists, and Mr. Bruce does not hesitate to say that if Franklin had been a supreme pleni- potentiary the war might have been averted and the Whole course. of history changed. He had been a great lover of England and the English, and many of his friendships survived the war. .The testimony of such men as Chatham and Burke is well known ;- it is interesting to be reminded that it was shared by so fastidious a critic as Horace Walpole. But perhaps the greatest tribute. to Franklin's worth is supplied in the record of his intercourse with his inconspicuous friends in America, England, and France, and with his poor relations at home. He was always keeping
• Benjamin Franklin Self-Revealed ; et Biographical and Critical Study baud
mainly on Meows Writings. By William Cavell Bruce. 2 vols. London : P. Putnam's Sons. 1253.1 his friendships in repair, by letters or gifts, and by his unfailing interest in the welfare of the rising generation, and this at a time when he was overwhelmed by the burden of his public duties. Thp bare record of his activities and achievements would fill all the space at our disposal. Mr. Bruce does well to remind us, how- ever, for it furnishes a clue to his character, that the entire structure of his renown as a philosopher and statesman was built up on his usiness career ; and that his early release from pecuniary anxieties (at the age of forty-two) enabled him to devote himself to scientific .periments, and to accept at the hands of the people of Pennsylvania the various posts and missions which opened up the wider horizons of his post-meridian life. For Franklin is a standing disproof of the claim that all the energetic tasks of human life are performed by young men. Ho was seventy when he entered on the most arduous and most successful phase of his diplomatic career in France ; he was seventy-nine when it ended, and on his return to America lived long enough to be thrice elected President of the State of Pennsylvania and to be a useful member of the Conven- tion that framed the Federal Constitution. He belonged to Europe as well as to America. After 1757 the greater part of his life was spent abroad ; of its eighty-four years, some twenty-six were passed in England and France.
The son of a tallow-chandler, apprenticed as a boy to a printer, he soon became a master of his craft, and, though he had no schooling after he was ten and was practically self-educated, while still a young man he acquired an influence, as a writer and editor of the ablest Colonial newspaper, which marked him out for office. Successively Clerk, member, and, for a time, Speaker of the Pennsyl- vania Assembly, he was the protagonist of the popular Party in Li lei r long opposition to the rapvcities of the Proprietary Government. For William Penn he had some respect ; of his sons, and especially Thomas Penn, he habitually spoke and wrote with a bitterness foreign to his nature. It was Franklin's SUCCE1132 as the spokesman in England of the Assembly:and his consummate ability as a negotiator, that led to the extension of his functions when the Pennsylvania feud was merged in the larger issues involved in the Stamp Act. It was indeed fortunate for America that both before and during the War of Independence her interests abroad were confided to the wisest, the most moderate, and the most respected American of his time. Even after his dismissal from office by the Privy Council he laboured to avert war, and considered the destruction of the tea at Boston as an act of violent injustice: It was not until he returned to America in 1776 that he recognized that the breach was inevitable, and at once showed himself as resolute in championing independence and armed resistance as he had been patient in counselling a policy of conciliation. His mission to Canada was one of the few failures in his career, but he redeemed his prestige triumphantly in France. Indeed, Mr. Bruce hardly oversteps the truth when he asserts that "what Washington was to America in the field, Franklin was to her in the foreign relations upon which it may well be doubted whether the success of her arms did not at times depend." Admired and respected outside the Tory camp in England, he was idolized in France. This was not merely because of his eminence as the greatest American man of science ; it was the result of his social gifts, his liberal and sympathetic nature, his cosmopolitan adaptability. He was terribly handicapped by the tactlessness, incompetence, and jealousy of his colleagues, he was often badly served by Congress, he was unthrstaffed and overworked and saddled with an overwhelming burden of responsibilities, yet he found time for everything—even for philandering. The best proof that his head was not turned by adulation is perhaps to be found in his comment on Turgot's tremendous epigram, Eripuitcaelo Jul men sceptrumque tyrannis "In spite of my electrical experiments, the lightning descends just the same before my very nose and beard ; and, as to tyrants, there have been more than a million of us engaged in snatching his sceptre from him." As regards his achievements in the domain of science, "the domestication of lightning and the invention of the lightning rod were the two things to which Franklin was principally indebted for his brilliant reputation as a philosopher." He was invested with almost divine honours for his discoveries. But though recognition outran his deserts, the most eminent physicists of to-day freely acknowledge the fruitfulness of his conjectures, and have noticed how near he came to anticipating the discoveries and theories of Cavendish, Clerk Maxwell, and Hertz. He was an indefatigable experimentalist, and was deeply interested in every form of the utilitarian application of science. His enthusiasm for balloons was notorious. When some one asked him scornfully what was the use of a balloon, he retorted : "What is the use of a new-born baby ? " In fine, but for the dis- traction of political oases, he might have gone very far indeed in scientific research. His efficiency as an administrator was proved by the excellence of the American postal service when under his supervision
Mr. Bruce sums up Franklin's services as a philanthropist and citizen by saying that probably no private individual with such limited pecuniary resources ever did so much for the moral and intellectual welfare of any one community as Franklin did for
pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia. He was a cogent and pointed if not eloquent speaker, and with his pen a master of racy and homely prose. He never wrote for the mere pleasure of writing, but always to serve a practical purpose ; style with him was invariably subordinated to efficiency. But he was a brilliant pamphleteer and a vivacious essayist, excelling in apologues, and using an,.-3dote to drive home argument much in Lincoln's way. Horace Walpole spoke of him as a first-rate pen., and Sydney Smith, who knew something about humour, threatened to dis- inherit his daughter if she did not admire everything written by Franklin. He was a bad poet and a puerile theologian, and his artificial schemes for cultivating virtue on purely prudential grounds show his utilitarianism in its most frigid form. But his practice belied his doctrine, and we gladly turn from his views on the art of virtue, or his grotesque revision of the Prayer Book in part- nership with Sir Francis Dashwood (of Medmenham Abbey fame), to the kind, considerate, and affectionate friend whose active benevolence was unimpaired by his own illness or suffering, to the far- sighted politician and philosopher who viewed the problems of his time " with a mind as far from the prejudices and errors of his age as if he had lived a hundred years later " ; in fine, who, in Matthew Arnold's judgment, was "the very incarnation of sanity and clear sense,"
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