Books: French Jefferson

LA FAYETTE—Brand Whitlock—Apple-ton (two vols.—$10).

All that Biographer Whitlock has written has been written before—and often. That no living figure emerges from 927 pages is due, not alone to a gullible reliance on the smooth, hard surface of La Fayette's memoirs, but to the Whitlock intentions and method: "I have tried to look through his eyes at the men he knew and events. ... I have not made up any conversations or rearranged any events with an eye to dramatic effect." Biographer Whitlock's eclectic synthesis, whatever it may do to the real La Fayette, emphasizes the not very astonishing fact that his guiding principle was liberty-love. Only in the dullest of classrooms will the Whitlock style of biography not seem to produce a tedious ache.