Glory

LA FAYETTE--Henry Dwight Sedgwick --Bobbs-Merrill ($5.00).

LAFAYETTE--Joseph Delteil--translated by Jacques Le Clercq--Minton, Batch ($3.50).

"Lafayette, we are here!" (1917) attributed something of immortality to that life-loving Frenchman. The tribute is now substantiated by two contrasting biographies which have nothing in common but their enthusiasm for the subject, and their readability.

Mr. Sedgwick's is a serious study (418 pages plus impressive bibliography), enlivened not so much by any notable literary deftness as by the essential virility of the events he narrates. In satisfactory array he sets the three episodes of Lafayette's life. First, the familiar youthful adventures in the American Revolution which he undertook in search of gloire. The second episode, less familiar to U. S. readers, is Lafayette's part in the French Revolution, when for a time many thought him "master of the fate of France." Undoubtedly his enthusiasm for liberty had much to do with getting the revolution under way, but his essential fair-mindedness recoiled from the revolutionary excesses, and led him to sympathize with abused royalty. But royalty would have none of his sympathy--he a republican constitutionalist. And republican constitutionalists, who had unanimously elected him commandant of the National Guard, grew suspicious of royalist sympathies, which he tried to reconcile with high-flown eulogies on American republican liberties. Thus his command was quickly turned into long years of exile and imprisonment. Retired thereafter to his country estate, he rebuffed Napoleon's repeated overtures, and did not enter upon his third episode until the revolution of 1830, when again he tried to establish liberty for the people.

Belittling the value of so much fact and circumstance, Delteil devotes impassioned flights of lyrical prose to "inventing" the soul of the man. The French biographer alleges that Lafayette's passion for liberty, conceived in the free country life of his childhood, took the place of that hairy-chested sensuality which marks the true male. His rightful masculine virility sought expression in idealism rather than the self-assertiveness which would have kept him from repeated failure. This very quality of the heart rather than the calculating mind is, Delteil claims, what has endeared Lafayette to France. "I admire Napoleon; I like Lafayette."

The great-hearted enthusiasms of Lafayette are no doubt clues to his career, but the silly diagnosis of lack of sexuality is no answer to the nice historical enigma of Lafayette's essential failure in spite of the eminent positions he attained. Biographer Sedgwick, sober, logical, undertakes to explain that failure by the fact that Lafayette kept a middle course which proved unpopular with both conservatives and radicals. His characteristic indecisiveness proved fatal in a day when Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre forged ruthlessly ahead.