Lawyer and Elegist
Every one knows Clarence Darrow as a fighting labour lawyer, a double-handed berserker of the bar. Only his friends know that at heart he is an elegiac poet. Yet any one who wishes may find this out by reading his exquisite half-novel, half-autobiography, Farmington. It has unstinting veracity; it has mellow moods and ivory texture. The book rises naturally from the spirit, dear to the American tradition, of tender affection for some native village. Thousands of men daily dream thus of childhood, but the pictures which come before them are dimmed by short memory or distorted by sentimentalism or falsified by some subsequent prejudice. Mr. Darrow’s Farmington, it is true, lies continually in a golden haze, melts and flows, increases and then diminishes like a living legend. The colours, however, have grown truer not fainter, and the forms of his remembered existence more substantial if less sharp-edged. Richly and warmly as he visualizes that perished universe, he has not brought in illusions to multiply his pleasure in it. What gave him pain as a boy he remembers as pain and will not make out to have been a joke. What gave him delight he remembers as delight, not as an offence to be expiated by an older conscience. Such dreams do not lie. They are the foundations on which truth mounts above facts. To Farmington they impart a firmness which enables an honest reader to move confidently among its lovely pictures without the sense that a breath may shatter them. The ringing laughter of Mark Twain’s Hannibal never sounds through Mr. Darrow’s softer pages: herein lies a limitation of Farmington, its lack of a large masculine vitality. But that, of course, is just the quality which we have no right to ask for in an exquisite elegiac poem.