His own genius was Hebraic, and not, as Matthew
Arnold thought, Hellenic. It should be incidentally stated that Lowell
had great admiration for the Jews. The late Dr. Weir Mitchell once told
me that Lowell regretted that he was not a Jew and even wished that he
had a Hebraic nose. Several documents attest to Lowell's ideas on the
subject. He even claimed that his middle name "Russell" showed that he
had Jewish blood. A.M.]
If Mr. Forster's mind had not the penetrative, illuminating quality of
genius, he was not without some very definite qualifications for his
task. The sturdy temper of his intellect fits him for a subject which is
beset with pitfalls for the sentimentalizer. A finer sense might recoil
before investigations whose importance is not at first so clear as their
promise of unsavoriness. So far as Mr. Forster has gone, we think he has
succeeded in the highest duty of a biographer: that of making his
subject interesting and humanly sympathetic to the reader--a feat surely
of some difficulty with a professed cynic like Swift. He lets him in the
main tell his own story--a method not always trustworthy, to be sure,
but safer in the case of one who, whatever else he may have been, was
almost brutally sincere when he could be so with safety or advantage.
Still, it should always be borne in mind that he _could_ lie with an air
of honest candor fit to deceive the very elect.
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