If I had been able to analyze the equipment which a biographer has to bring to his task, I should probably never have had the presumption to undertake the work. Now through writing a biography, I have learned humbly some of the essential requirements for it.
I now know that a biography requires the infinite patience of the research student with his skill at organization of facts but with no such simple expedient of recording them in an orderly way for a doctor’s degree. The work for a doctor’s degree would be only the beginning of a biography! For the ramifications connected with digging out a life and presenting it as a complete whole are endless. The biographer could go on reading forever about the periods and countries which gave a man existence.
For a biographer must know not only his subject from birth to death, but the background of ancestry which produced him and delivered him over to the world the person that he is. He must know the people and the social conditions of the countries where the man lived and worked, and how they affected his life and achievements. For no man lives alone! Louis Agassiz came out of Switzerland, chose Germany for study, France and England for stimulus to his progress, and America for work and for living, thus making a good deal of trouble for his biographers, one of whom feels that she was never really educated before.
The biographer needs also to see his material with the selective eye of a fiction writer. He must be able to dramatize the problems and high points of a man’s career until they become as real to the reader as his own. He must know how to discard insignificant items, a process with which the research student is usually unacquainted. He must supply the concrete details which no man can remember from the past by identifying himself so closely with the character that he sees and feels and hears with him. Without this re-creation his biography can have none of the reality which a reader needs to share an experience and realize its truth.
Finally the biographer must have the interpretive power of a wise and understanding critic. He must see his man as an individual, and as a member of the society wherein he moves. He must realize his faults and his weaknesses as well as the glory which has made him what he is. He must keep a wise balance of praise and blame. No man has lived whose life would not reveal some grounds for negative criticism, but if there is nothing more to say about a person, much better make another choice of character.
Then, since a man does not become quickened into life through the dates of his existence, the biographer learns to use dates as keys to unlock the rooms where the man has lived with his contemporaries. If the reader can have an intimate sense of Louis Agassiz’s loss when Cuvier died and left him alone in Paris, of his dependence upon Humboldt’s advice, whether he took it or not, of his Saturday night walk back to Cambridge with Lowell, he may realize the man more accurately than through a list of precise dates.
I therefore salute all biographers with the realization that only a complete lifetime is sufficient preparation to join their high calling. I have tried here simply to capture some of the essence of the man who, boy to man, never ceased to be a Runner of the Mountain Tops.
MABEL L. ROBINSON
PART I: SHELTERED VALLEYS
1. A BOY’S DAY
The sky paled as morning came over the mountains. The velvet dark peaks stretched themselves into the lake until water and earth were one. Their still shadows on the water no longer held stars. Slowly the lake brightened into blue, and when the wind poured down the mountain side and broke it into shining fragments, day had come.
The wind carried the fragrance of deep woods and high sweet pastures into a room where a child slept. He stirred as if called. In his sleep he heard the cowbells, clear, irregular, as the cows moved knee-deep at grazing. A rooster crowed under the window, and he wakened like a puppy, all at once, scenting the day sharply.
The rest of the parsonage lay quiet under the brightening sky but the boy’s room, washed through with the clean air, woke with him. In every corner but one. The low-hanging roof of the Swiss chalet still held its shadows there around a small curled-up figure on a cot. The boy moved from the window where the mountain tops were turning to gold, and as he advanced on the small figure, he seemed to blow the last shadows from dark corners.
“Wake up, Auguste,” and whether he would or not, Auguste had to awake. He stretched shivering to pull back his blankets.
“Please, please, Louis,” he begged, “it is not time.”
“It is time.” Louis was inexorable. “I am up.”
And so Auguste knew that it was time, and he got up. But before he had rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, Louis was dressed and racing down the stairs. Auguste looked at his stripped cot a moment, but then he sighed and began to pull on his clothes.
Outside, the yard had the curiously empty feeling of early dawn as if all sleeping things had taken away with them the essence of themselves and left behind nothing but their quiet bodies. The great apricot tree stood pale as moonlight in the dawn, alive only in its fragrance.
When the door of the house opened, the yard woke as if the boy’s vitality, like the wind pouring down the mountain, had roused whatever it touched. He moved swiftly and surely, and the apricot tree hummed with the bees at work, small squeaks and chatters rose from tiers of slatted boxes, and the clear water of the great stone basin rippled with the silver backs of fish.
The boy’s competent fingers unfastened each cage, selected with precision the proper food, and moved to the next in steady rotation. Mice, rabbits, birds, guinea pigs, snakes, fed and somehow greeted by the keen dark eyes bent upon them, fell to satisfied munching. Now and then Louis drew a homemade book from his wide pocket and made brief notes of new arrivals or of oldest inhabitants. Once he made a quick sketch, intent eyes on a crawling snail, and nodded with satisfaction at the result.
As he sprinkled fish food over the pool he suddenly became aware that everything in his household had had its breakfast except himself. Almost he could have finished the fish food himself. He flung it at the leaping fish, and ran.
At the door he passed Auguste on his way to the yard. “I gave your collections no food at all,” he said. “If they are to live and grow, you must take care of them.”
Auguste was hungry, too, but he went on to his corner of the yard.
Then Louis laughed. Laughed because of the beauty of the new day, and the strong life that ran in his veins, and the disgruntled face of his young brother. When his laughter rang out a chaffinch in the apricot tree burst into song and instantly Louis whistled the song back to him. Auguste broke into a canter and when the door had slammed, he whistled too, but the chaffinch paid no attention to him.
In the clean warm kitchen Louis pulled up a chair to the scrubbed table. The stout woman who helped his mother gave him his hot rolls while she stirred about the business of real breakfast. He talked companionably to her and ate rolls and honey and sweet butter, and drank large glasses of creamy milk. Auguste joined him and the two boys finished the basket of rolls while they discussed the day ahead of them. The Swiss woman groaned but she filled the basket again and set the pitcher of milk where they could reach it. Rose Agassiz saw to it that these boys had plenty to grow on. The little family that she had lost in the hard north still haunted her. These children of the sunny vineyards should have every chance.
Louis sniffed at the rich aroma of chocolate simmering on the stove for the family breakfast. “One small drop,” he begged, and then needed another roll and honey for the chocolate. Auguste sighed. He could never hold as much as Louis.
The sun was over the mountains and had swung the clear day into its course when the boys raced down the shore of the lake of Morat. The fishermen who were dawdling over their boats straightened into activity. “Here, but here!” they called, beckoning, waving ends of nets, pointing to their fine red sails. Auguste slipped into the nearest boat where he watched his brother. Again that vitality poured out and got its response. Dark faces, gesticulating bodies, gay French greetings, the shore was alive in its competition fo
r the pastor’s son. When Louis chose the boat which had saved him a perfect shell, Auguste smiled a little apologetically at his sailor. He knew that nothing he could offer would rouse the laughter, the activity, the very luck with fish, which would follow that other boat sailing out into the sun.
By the middle of the morning they were back again, Louis with a new trick at catching fish and two odd specimens for his pool. Auguste was already in the quiet dark study, his fair head bent over the day’s lesson. Louis rubbed the fish scales from his hands and reached for a book which might help him with his new find. His father waited until the lad had identified his fish. “Latin now,” he said, and the day’s lessons started. Auguste nodded now and then, for the sun and wind on the water had been strong. But Louis sprang at his problems with the zest of a sharp mind, well-rested and longing for exercise.
“Not so quick, pas si vite,” the pastor warned that he might not show his pride. “Some day you will leap so hard on a wrong conclusion that you will ache well.”
But slowness was not in Louis. And of all his pupils whom the pastor taught with consummate skill and deep love of it, not one could touch his son. When he spoke of this brilliant child to his wife, she did not rebuke him for his worldly pride. “We must find ways to feed his mind as well as his body,” she said, and fell to thinking of the ways.
Louis was ten years old this spring, and when the fall vacation was over he must enter a real school. They had done well by him at home. He had all the strength that those earlier frail children had lacked, his mother’s heart was at rest about his health. Now he must have the stronger meat which his mind craved. She called to him when he left the study.
“Louis, my son, would you like to enter the College of Bienne when it opens again?”
Louis flung his arms around his mother’s waist. “Ah, ma mère, I would like it better than anything in the world.”
If in his eagerness to try a new world he forgot to regret the old, his mother showed no hurt. She brushed the fish scales from her skirt and smiled, understanding her son. “It is settled then,” she said and went on with the ways and means of his departure from her.
Through the long June afternoon two young figures, intent, cautious, crept along the lakeshore. It was no game of pirates which held them to their course. Each boy swung a milk pail on his arm, a pail which grew heavier as he went on. Out of the golden heat into dripping caves where the water was green around their knees and they had to bend to see the small creatures who lived in it. Quick as a humming bird’s flash, and from Louis the sound of the satisfied hunter. Out again into the sunshine where under rocks piled against the lake wall a fish might reasonably expect privacy, their quick fingers pried and captured. If at times Auguste looked wistfully at a stretch of clean dry sand, he expected no encouragement from Louis. Rest was not in the boy.
At last he straightened from a weedy pool and in one swift stretching motion shed his few clothes. This was the part of the hunt for which Auguste waited. With long slow strokes the boys slipped as silently through the water as the fish they sought. Then flat and still on the surface while Louis made odd crooning noises in his throat and moved his fingers lightly as if beckoning in the water. The fingers closed, the white young body tread erect, and thrust upward, a wet hand like a boy fountain holding his fish. Auguste stopped his futile waggling and paddled beside Louis while they examined the fish. It had stopped struggling in the firm grasp. Louis opened his fingers and the fish swam unhurriedly away.
“Go,” said Louis, “and trouble me no more. I have dozens of you. See, Auguste, this is the way you do it,” and he turned again on his back.
But Auguste had discovered that the sun was low, and that a lake fed from the Oberland was still cold in June, and that he was hungry. When Auguste made up his sturdy mind to differ from his brother, Louis knew better than to object. He swam toward the shore. It was, after all, chilly and he was suddenly devoured by hunger. But tomorrow he would surely teach Auguste to catch his fish alive.
Supper was a leisurely meal in the pastor’s family. At the end of the long June day while it was still so light that they needed no candles, they sat about the big table and told the day over to each other. The two little girls, brushed and clean, sat at their end of the table quietly attentive. Experience had taught them their role. They ate the wild strawberries which they had patiently picked in the sweet-smelling pastures, and looked at each other with pleasure when Louis asked for a third dish of them. They listened intently to his tale of the new fish for the aquarium.
“I will draw it for you tomorrow,” Cecile said. “It will be less difficult than this troublesome mouse,” She held up a sketch from the pile by her plate. The father took it, examined it, and passed it down to Louis and Auguste at their end of the table.
They looked at it and Auguste shook his head. “I would have no notion that it was a mouse,” he said. But Louis flashed his brilliant smile down the table at Cecile. “You have the joints just right,” he said, “the rest will come.”
“I am better at landscapes,” she sighed, “but I am sure that I can do your fish.”
“We will look at it together after supper,” promised Louis, and Cecile had the comfortable feeling that the fish would be right because Louis always knew the important details to point out to her.
“My doll’s shoes are not finished,” Olympe said firmly.
“They shall be,” Louis assured her, “but while it is light we must examine the fish. I will make them exactly like the shoes that the traveling shoemaker made for you last week. You shall see.”
Olympe could see the perfect little shoes already on her doll’s feet. Louis could do anything. All he had to do was to watch with those intent eyes of his, the tailor, the cooper, the shoemaker, and in a few days her dolls had profited. She could afford to wait.
Supper was finished and the pastor again gave reverent thanks for the bountiful food. But when they rose, Auguste still sat with his head bowed. Louis laughed and ran a long finger down the bent neck. Auguste stumbled to his feet and spoke thickly through his sleep. “The fish…” he said, “the fish…the fish…” and then because he could not remember what he meant to say about the fish, he said good night with the dignity of a sleepwalker and climbed the stairs. When Louis came to bed an hour later, the shoes finished, his brother in the darkened corner under the eaves did not stir to the quickening of a breath at his greeting.
In a few minutes the candle was out and the room as silent as if it were empty. Yet the feeling of life filled it with its presence, rich and plentiful life drawn into the two young bodies from the cool air, and the quiet, and the watchful house which sheltered them. The rhythm of renewal and of growth caught them up and swept them on toward the next dawn when the sun should ride high over the mountains.
2. OUT OF THE MOUNTAINS
Away up in the Jura mountains at the beginning of the nineteenth century lay a small valley. It was remote from any of the thrifty Swiss villages of the countryside, it was barren, the bitter cold of the winter softened only to penetrating chill in the summer, it was a small lost valley where men found it hard to live.
But the Swiss do not easily capitulate to hardship nor did they leave St. Imier because it presented such problems in living that some of them could find no solution and died. They struggled along with their scanty crops on weekdays, and on Sundays went to church for the much needed encouragement of the Lord and of their pastor. If the pastor, cold, ill-nourished, found such encouragement hard to deliver, they called another man, and somehow they always found their minister. A young man, perhaps, in his early twenties who had a young wife still in her teens, and who was sure that given a little practical experience, no parish in Switzerland would be closed to him. With high hopes and little else the young pair could face this bleak valley because the time would be so short.
For those first years of the century young pastor Agassiz shepherded his mountain flock. Beside him labored Rose, his wife, labored at
her tasks, and at bearing and losing children. One after another the babies came, struggled feebly, and went away again. When they had said the prayers for the dead over the fourth small grave, Rose and Rudolphe faced the dreary future. They could bear St. Imier no longer. It had taken the freshness of their life together and the heavy toll of their young family. Empty-handed as they came, they left.
As intolerable situations have a way of ending themselves when they are grappled, so the new life began to make up for the old. The parish of Motier was neither rich nor large, but it was a land of promise to the weary young pair. Almost like a fair island with the lakes and river bounding it and furnishing it shelter and fine growing soil. The vineyards were thick and green when they settled into the new parsonage, and in the yard a great apricot tree lifted fragrant blooms to the very sky. Rose felt the blood warm again in her chilled veins. Her bereft youth breathed the sunny air and flickered into hope that life still held something sweet for her.
The loneliness of the bleak valley with its little graves was a bad dream. Here she felt safe with her father, the good Doctor Mayor, at Cudrefin only a few miles away and in their own parish. For Rudolphe, the pastor, it was home land, too, with friends on every hillside ready to welcome him back. The parsonage was roomy and comfortable with sunshiny rooms where children could thrive. The wan young wife bloomed again into health and a quiet happiness growing from maturity which never left her.
On a spring day, May 28, 1807, the baby was born, the fifth child and yet the first, the real beginning of new life for Rose. A boy with a fine strong body and eyes of the dark blue that turns to brown, their eldest child now. They called him Jean Louis Rudolphe Agassiz when they baptized him, and Louis when they talked to him. They had no way of knowing that they had bestowed and were using a name of such greatness that the whole world would finally speak it. But his mother, Rose, though she had an inkling of what was to come, still felt the shadows of the dead too close. She dedicated herself to the care of this child. She set to work to earn those long years of rich companionship which lay ahead of her until she left her son in the ripe fullness of her years.
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