university of Virginia
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University of Virginia
Barbour-Page Foutidation

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY

BOOKS IN THE
PAGE-BARBOUR FOUNDATION
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
By William Roscoe Thayer
PROBLEMS OF LAW
By John Henry Wigmore
THE ORIGINS OF THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE
By A. C. Coolidge
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN INDIVIDUALISM AND
COLLECTIVISM IN A DEMOCRACY
By Charles W. Eliot
THE EARLY LITERARY CAREER OF ROBERT
BROWNING By Thomas R. Loimsbury

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

THE
ART OF BIOGRAPHY

BY
WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER
AtlTHOR OF "the LIFE AND TIMES OF CAVOUR"
"THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JOHN HAY "
"THEODORE ROOSEVELT: AN INTIMATE BIOGRAPHY," ETC.

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1920

¦^

\l

COPVEIGHT, 1920, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published September, 1920

15

>5

V.

^^

^0
EDWIN ANDERSON ALDERMAN
PRESIDENT OF
XHE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

I DEDICATE THIS LITTLE BOOK

Cambridge, Massachusetts
March 5, zg2o

THE BARBOUR-PAGE LECTURE
FOUNDATION
The University of Virginia is indebted
for the estabhshment of the Barbbur-Page
Foundation to the wisdom and generosity of
Mrs. Thomas Nelson Page, of Washington,
D. C. In 1907, Mrs. Page donated to the
University the sum of i^22,ooo, the annual
income of which is to be used in securing
each session the delivery before the Univer
sity of a series of not less than three lectures
by some distinguished man of letters or of
science. The conditions of the Foundation
require that the Barbour-Page lectures for
each session be not less than three in number;
that they be delivered by a specialist in some
branch of literature, science, or art; that the
vii

lecturer present in the series of lectures some
fresh aspect or aspects of the department of
thought in which he is a speciaUst; and that
the entire series delivered each session, taken
together, shall possess such unity that they
may be published by the Foundation in book
form.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. Biography in Antiquity .... i
II. From Medieval to Modern Bi
ography  55
III. Biography in the Nineteenth
Century  loi
A Short List of Books .... 149

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
I
BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
'T^HE instinct of reproduction is,
-¦- next to that of self-preservation,
the most imperative of all. It includes
not merely the desire to leave flesh-and-
blood progeny but also, after human
beings have reached a certain intel
lectual level, a desire to perpetuate
symbols of their thoughts and experi
ence, and evidences, hovi^ever crude, of
their passions. In the slow course of
ages the savage comes to regard him
self as an individual, that is, an ulti
mate unit, in his tribe or clan. Later
he discovers that he is a -person, a
being through whom some other being,
more than human, mysteriously speaks.

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
And so, as man acquires a richer en
dowment of expression, faculties more
delicate, talents which he learns to con
trol and to use with greater skill — in a
word, self-expression — become one of
his dominant characteristics.
Many of his records are unpremedi
tated. The rude figures which the
Laplander scratched on reindeer bones
had no further significance for him than
the gratification of a fleeting fancy.
He did not dream that they would be
used long afterward by anthropologists
to measure the degree of his savagery.
The rough daubings on the walls of an
Etruscan tomb may have had some
religious meaning to those who made
them; but for us who inspect them
now they are merely markers in the
scale of expression of the earliest
Etruscans. As men become more civilized, how
ever, they labor consciously to express

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
themselves. They feel an inner urging
to register remarkable events. A long
time passes before the private indi
vidual counts in these records. As
there is but one dominant person —
the monarch — in and above their
daily lives, and the collective life of
their community, so the monarch is
the subject around whom the chronicle
is woven. "In the days of the Great
King," or "In the ninth year of the
reign of Tiglath-Pileser" — so run the
formulas of the early chroniclers. But
the monarch continues to be for a long
time little more than a symbol or an
abstraction of one who is all-power
ful; neither his features nor his traits
are individualized. But the men and
women over whom a monarch reigned,
nature individualized; each knew joy
and suffering, each felt the glow of
hope, or the bitterness of despair; you
cannot lessen the weariness and pain
3

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
of the coffles of slaves who built the
Pyramids or rowed the galleys, by
generalizing. Still other generations
must elapse before any individual lower
than the monarch is held worthy of
having his personal record or expres
sion handed down.
Consider for a moment how arro
gant it seems that any man should
have his likeness preserved, his deeds,
his thoughts, his passions ! In the
face of Infinity and of Eternity, what
is he, but a speck f Is any particular
bubble on the ever-flowing stream of
Nile or Amazon — an iridescent beam
at one moment, and gone the next —
singled out for lasting remembrance ?
We look up at Sirius to-night, knowing
that the dart of light which reveals the
great star to us began its journey be
fore our civihzation itself began. If
we could, would we preserve to-night's
Sirian ray rather than to-morrow's .?
4

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
Such questions answer themselves. We
are men, and man is the measure for
us. With difficulty and striving and
many doubts and tears, we can come
to an understanding of our duty here.
The time tests of astronomy do not
concern us, except as they teach us
that we, too, are parts of the universe
and should conduct ourselves with all
the dignity which that implies.
I do not know which biography is
the first to escape oblivion. Doubtless
the earliest books of China, India,
Egypt, and Western Asia contain bi
ographical fragments hardly to be de
tached now from their surrounding
text. For my purposes, however, I
will take the story of Joseph in the
book of Genesis, as a starter. Al
though I suspect that parts of it may
be legendary and not biographical, it
contains on the whole an orderly, con
secutive, and, to a certain extent, indi-
S

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
vidualized life. It has, also, the typical
quality peculiar to primitive works.
An unusual play of emotion runs
through it, and there is a plot with
several dramatic crises which a mod
ern playwright might envy.
Joseph, the young son of the He
brew Patriarch Jacob, was hated by
his brothers. They were jealous of
him because their father loved him
best of all, and the boy had an annoy
ing way of dreaming dreams in which
they bowed down before him. While
tending their flocks they conspired to
gether to kill him, but one of them,
Reuben, advised against downright
murder lest they should have his blood
upon their hands. So they put him
into a dry pit, having first stripped
him of a coat of many colors which his
father had given him, and Reuben
hoped to steal back and rescue the
boy after the other brothers had de-
6

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
parted. But a caravan of Ishmaelites
came by on their way to Egypt with
spicery and balm and myrrh, and
Judah, another brother, with a true
racial instinct for the commercial value,
even of brothers, argued that, as it
would profit them nothing to slay little
Joseph, they should sell him to the
Ishmaelites. This they did, and re
ceived for him twenty pieces of silver,
about twelve dollars in American cash.
They killed a goat, smeared with its
blood the coat of many colors, and re
turned to Jacob, letting him suppose
that his darling Joseph had been de
voured by wild beasts.
The Ishmaelites went on into Egypt
with the lad, and there Potiphar, Cap
tain of the Guard to Pharaoh, bought
him. Joseph was both wilhng, indus
trious, and far-sighted, and the Lord
made all that he did to prosper. Poti
phar, appreciating his value, promoted
7

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
him from post to post, until he rose
to be the chief person, except his mas
ter, in the house.
Prosperity, however, though coveted
by everybody, makes a dull back
ground to a story, and so the ancient
Hebrew or Egyptian biographer brings
in at this point an almost tragic inter
ruption. Potiphar's wife fell violently
in love with the young and handsome
Joseph, and attempted to seduce him,
but he broke away from her and then
she, in fury at being scorned, ac
cused him to her husband. Thereupon
Joseph was thrown into prison and
had only the blackest future to look
forward to. Some of his fellow pris
oners had ominous dreams, which he
interpreted, and, as his interpretations
were verified, Joseph's reputation as a
diviner spread beyond his prison walls.
After a while Pharaoh 'himself took
to dreaming. He saw seven fat-flesh

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
kine which seven thin and lean kine
swallowed up. He dreamed also that
seven ears of corn came up in one
stalk, full and good; and that seven
other ears thin and withered and
blasted with the east wind sprang up
after them. In anxiety Pharaoh sent
for his magicians, but none of them
could interpret his dreams. Finally,
having heard of Joseph, he ordered him
to be brought from his dungeon, and
Joseph interpreted the dreams as por
tending that after seven years of abun
dant harvests there would follow seven
years of dearth.
Pharaoh rewarded him by making
him Governor of Egypt, second to
none except himself, and during the
seven years of plenty Joseph, like an
ancient Hoover, stored up, collected,
and distributed grain and foodstuffs.
Now, by a stroke of consummate art,
if this be a story and not an act-
9

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
ual biography, the connection between
Joseph's youth and the period of his
power and splendor in Egypt is made.
The years of dearth blasted the land
of Canaan, and, when the pinch of
hunger came, Jacob sent his sons down
into Egypt to buy corn. There they
dealt with Joseph, whom they did not
recognize, but he recognized them and
inquired for his father and the family,
and when he heard that his mother
had a younger son, Benjamin, Joseph
desired to see him. His brothers talked
among themselves in Hebrew and did
not suppose that Joseph, with whom
they spoke in Egyptian, understood
them. But he sent them home with
their sacks filled with corn, and with
the money they had brought to pay
for it in the mouth of each sack. He
required them to leave Simeon, one
of their brothers, and to return with
Benjamin. IO

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
When they told their father Jacob of
this demand he grieved sorely, for he
had never ceased to lament the loss of
Joseph, the youngest in the earlier
time, and he feared now to lose Ben
jamin. Nevertheless, he consented at
last rather than see all his people perish
from hunger. So the brothers came
again into Egypt with Benjamin, and
when Joseph saw his own brother, the
little Benjamin, he was so much moved
that he went into another room and
wept. After various contrivings, by
which Joseph aimed at prolonging the
anxiety of his brothers, for they were
stricken with remorse and attributed
the evils which had come to them as
punishment for their sin against Joseph
in selling him to the Ishmaelites, he
made himself known to them, and they
fell down and bowed their heads be
fore him, thus fulfilling the early dream
which had made them hate him.
II

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
The brothers were much amazed to
find Joseph the chief person in Egypt,
and perhaps they wondered whether
he would not punish them for their
wickedness long ago. But his affec
tion prevailed. He kissed them and
wept upon their necks, and they talked
together. Pharaoh rejoiced when he
heard of their coming, and he approved
of Joseph's plan of sending them back
to Canaan to fetch Jacob and all of
Jacob's family into Egypt. This they
did. The Patriarch came and was
given lands and cattle, and, with his
children and grandchildren around him,
he prospered to the day of his death.
Joseph survived him many years, never
losing the good-will of the Pharaohs
whom he served.
If the story was written to illustrate
a moral, the moral is plain. Except
for the long intervals of time which
pass when nothing happens, it would
12

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
make an excellent drama, to which the
two or three side episodes lend variety.
Nothing could be more natural than
the way in which results flow from
the precedent causes. The uniformity
with which Joseph always acts in char
acter — is always generous and affec
tionate, self-controlled and virtuous —
inclines me to believe that he was a
real person, the story of whose life
was handed down because it made a
very deep impression upon both the
Israelites and the Egyptians. The
usual fable, or apologue, lacks the very
precise individualized traits which are
salient here.
In other parts of the Old Testament
we come upon evident biographical
fragments. The story of David, for ^^
example, is very vivid and personal, and
it abounds in those supreme touches
which the old Hebrew genius always
displayed. Nevertheless, David's life,
13

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
like that of Joshua, seems to be history
rather than biography.
When we come to the earliest of the
Greek writers who may, on several ac
counts, be considered biographers, we
are met by a similar intermixing of his
tory and biography. Xenophon, who
seems to me one of the Greeks of the
great period who had a strange, man-of-
the-world quality for an Athenian of
his time, wrote two books which have
been classed ever since as biographies,
although, when you examine them
closely, you see that other characteris
tics preponderate. Xenophon's "Cyro-
paedia" purports to describe the boy
hood and training of the great king Cy
rus; but much of this period is known
only through hearsay and legend, and
then, when Xenophon goes on to tell
about the campaigns and administra
tion of Cyrus, he obviously becomes
more historical than biographical. In-
14

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
deed, I might say philosophical, be
cause he often inserts an anecdote or a
reflection which may or may not belong
to Cyrus but expresses the author's own
view. Likewise, in his " Memorabilia of the
Life of Socrates" he follows no logical
biographical order, but narrates in a
discursive and entertaining style his
recollections of Socrates and the stories
he has heard. Xenophon was a sharp-
eyed, clear-headed, practical man, and,
like most practical men, he did not dis
cern the deep and fine and exalting
things of the spirit. Years ago I re
member a practical man who was the
neighbor of Ralph Waldo Emerson at
Concord. When I asked him about
Emerson he replied: "He was an hon
est man and a good neighbor. He al
ways kept his half of the fence in re
pair." That was all that he saw, and
his only means of judging Emerson. So
IS

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
Xenophon, in spite of having a pierc
ing intellect and various real talents,
never fathomed the Socratic deeps. It
took Plato for that — if, in fact, some
of the deeps which Plato attributed to
Socrates were not his own. Perhaps I
have said enough to indicate why
Xenophon's "Cyropaedia" and "Mem
orabilia," interesting though they be,
and important, are not examples of true
biography. What, you ask, is the difference be
tween history and biography ? What
should a biography tell .? First, it should
reveal to us the individual, man or
woman, that indivisible unit which
has no exact counterpart in the world.
But this alone is not enough — the indi
vidual may be known to us chiefly as a
soldier, or a poet, or a statesman, or a
merchant; so we must have unfolded
to us the inevitable reactions between
the individual and his profession.
Next, if not first, we shall expect to
i6

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
learn how his environment in time and
in place affects him. These are very
subtle processes, although the class of
men of science that regard all life, hu
man and animal, as a manifestation of
materialism "explain" us all as the
mere products of our environment.
This I do not believe.
Judged by whatever standard, the
first real master of biography was Plu
tarch, a Greek who flourished in the
latter half of the first century of the
Christian era. His "Lives" of the
celebrated Greeks and Romans of an
tiquity are a splendid monument to his
instinct for penetrating to the heart of
individuals. Not only events interest
him, but also the way in which states
men or soldiers shape events. In his
Parallels he uses the comparative
method, and tries to discover wherein
Solon differed from Numa or Pompey
from Marcus Brutus.
Plutarch has so large and hospitable
17

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
a mind that he brings with him an en
tire civilization. His random allusions,
his quotations from ancient poets and
prose-writers, his use of popular say
ings current in his time, his familiar
ity with traditions, and with the gossip
about great men, which often exceeds
in trustworthiness the formal written
statement, cannot be matched by any
modern biographer. For the modern
necessarily embraces only a fragment
of his civilization; Plutarch, on the
contrary, saw the record of Greece as
closed and complete, and the record of
Rome also — of Republican and char
acteristic Rome — as already made up.
In this respect no modern can hope
to compete with Plutarch. You may
write a life of Bismarck, who was indis
putably a world figure, but you cannot
give to him the peculiar quality which
belonged to Pericles or to Caesar, a
quality which emanates from Plutarch's

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
sketches of those great men like fra
grance from a flower. As time goes on
I suspect that posterity will see Bis
marck loom up as Charlemagne does, or
as Frederick Barbarossa, a huge fig
ure amid surroundings which cannot
be considered civilized in spirit. But
when we read in Plutarch of Epami-
nondas or Timoleon, we feel that in
spite of the lawlessness or quarrels
amid which they lived, there was noth
ing barbaric about them.
It was Plutarch's good fortune, of
course, to inherit, as it were
"The glory that was Greece,"
and to be encircled by
"The grandeur that was Rome."
But it is to his everlasting personal
credit that by his knowledge and quick
sympathy, coupled with genius, he em
bodied so much of the classical civiliza
tion in his works. 19

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
No wonder that the following story
of Theodorus Gaza, the great scholar
at the Revival of Learning, has been
often quoted: "'Tis said that, having
this extravagant question put to him
by a friend, that if learning must suffer
a general shipwreck, and he had only
his choice left him of preserving one
author, who should be the man he
would preserve, he answered, Plutarch;
and probably might give this reason,
that in saving him he should secure the
best collection of them all."
Being a moralist and immensely
curious, as Job was, to understand why
the Gods, who planted moral laws in the
hearts of men, allowed the wicked to
flourish and the virtuous to fail, he
sometimes uses the subjects of his
"Lives" as examples of the way in
which moral laws disclosed themselves
through mortal careers. Our age re
sents being "preached to," as it calls
20

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
moralizing of this sort. But fashion
changes; a century ago our ancestors
not only submitted to but relished
moral reflections. Southey's "Life of
Nelson" abounds in them, and it would
be entertaining to inquire why South
ey's Anglican moralizing seems almost
obsolete, like that of the Sunday-school
books of my youth, while Plutarch's is
fresh and pertinent.
What Plutarch added to the Art of
Biography was, therefore, most im
portant. He reached the point of de
fining each individual very clearly.
He had a most catholic interest in many
types of persons, and in the case of
public men he showed how far their
individual qualities affected their pub
lic actions. As you first read the long
series of his "Lives" you have an im
pression not unlike that which comes
to you when you first walk through the
Hall of Busts at the Naples Museum;
21

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
but when you stop to examine and to
compare, you discover that each differs
from the others, that each face has its
own features.
Among so many and divers speci
mens I find it hard to choose special
models; "Read until you are satisfied,"
would be the best advice; but if you
wish to see Plutarch's methods and
scope fairly illustrated, read, say, the
"Alcibiades" and the "Julius Caesar."
What modern biographer could add
much that is essential to our knowledge
from Plutarch of the fundamental
character of either of these men .? In
one respect the modern would make
more orderly biographies. Plutarch
writes by topics and not by chronology,
so that we are not always sure where
this or that episode belongs in time;
but in spite of this lack we feel on fin
ishing one of Plutarch's sketches that
he has included all of the most neces-
22

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
sary facts about his subject. And our
desire for chronology and sequence is
really very modern. Sir Izaak Walton
did not have it, nor did most of the
writers of lives in the sixteenth, seven
teenth, and eighteenth centuries. We
feel this desire, I think, because of the
idea with us that in individuals, as in ^
tribes and races, there is a constant
evolution. So we are most curious to know how
the older man grew out of the younger, >
how the youthful Virginia hunter and
surveyor, George Washington, became
the founder of the American Republic,
the most sane and perfectly poised of
all statesmen. Events alone did not
make him, but he had something in
him to which events attached them
selves, as iron filings to a magnet; and
so of our still more unusual American,
Abraham Lincoln, who, raised among
wild and sordid backwoods conditions,
23

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
rose to wield power beyond that of
Czars, without ever harboring a selfish,
despotic thought. These amazing con
trasts — call them paradoxes if you
will — are what most absorb our at
tention. The contrast need not be one
of event or position alone, but it may
inhere in the character of the indi
vidual. We seek to explain the lapse
into treason which no remorse could
expiate, of Benedict Arnold, after nearly
forty years of an apparently honor
able life. There is an old Latin proverb,
"Nemo turpissimus repente" — nobody
turns absolutely bad all of a sudden.
We wish to trace the steps by which
the delinquence from virtue to guilt
was reached. These are usually hidden
and hard to uncover; for motive lies
behind human acts, and motives are
often very subtle. I was talking with
President Roosevelt about some points
in his career. He said nothing for two
24

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
or three minutes, and then, as if musing
to himself, he said: "How strange mo
tives are ! When you did a certain
thing, you thought that a single, clear
reason determined you, but on looking
back you see instead half a dozen
mixed motives, which you did not sus
pect at the time."
The Mystery of the Will interests us
most, as soon as we perceive that the
Will guides conduct and action. Re
cent psychologists tell us that nobody
is made all of one piece — all good or
all bad; but that the state of conscious
ness in which each of us lives is based
on subconsciousness, a compound of
physical instincts and desires, of in
tuitions and inherited tendencies. All
these perpetually try to stream up into
consciousness and control it. When
the animal in us, for instance, breaks
through, we revert to cruelty, or to
cunning, or to lust; and the object of
25

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
every civilization worthy of the name,
is to strengthen the barrier so that these
primal lower instincts shall be kept
down. "Each of us," said a well-
known psychologist to me, "is like an
iceberg, two-thirds of which lies under
water. We have mistakenly supposed
that the third above the surface — our
consciousness — which we see, was all."
This psychological aspect of person
ality greatly increases, of course, our
difficulty in following the manifesta
tions of the will. But this aspect,
being quite modern, never appeared to
Plutarch, or to the Ancients. They
looked on men and their deeds as un-
complex, and I, at least, find a certain
calming simplicity both in their bi
ographies and histories, and in their
epics and tragedies. Thanks to the
divine faculty of the Imagination,
Homer and Sophocles penetrated to
the bottom of the human heart, so that,
26

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
although they had no knowledge of
double and triple personality or of the
Freudian Wish, or of inhibitions and
hysteria, they were able to create fig
ures which have never lost their hold
on posterity. And yet the simplicity
to which I allude belongs to them all,
and it may be owing to their direct and
naive attitude toward actual persons.
In reading their works we are spared the
feeling that the author is leading us
through the solution of a series of prob
lems. The shadow of the problem
darkens almost every intellectual prod
uct of the last half-century. But the
Ancient, although he felt the burden
of the mystery not less than the Mod
ern feels it, kept a certain spontaneity,
a freshness of outlook, and a sense of
undulled wonder toward life.
We, on the other hand, are sophisti
cated; our deepest emotions, our strong
est passions, have all been dissected and
27

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
classified, and described in books, to be
pawed over and studied as problems.
For Plutarch, however, all was differ
ent. He was, I suppose, the most
learned in philosophy, as well as in the
immediate knowledge of history, of any
biographer ancient or modern, but this
did not rob him of spontaneity or his
other ancient inheritance. He lacked,
necessarily, our modern view of per
sonality, and so he was not subtle,
and he overlooked matters which seem
to us mysterious and interesting. We
recognize that in a large sense he carves
each of his subjects out of a single
block of stone — granite or marble or
basalt, as the case may be — and yet
his skill in portraying, and his human
imagination produce finished products
consistent, generally logical, and always
lifelike. To understand his power to
differentiate between mythical and
half-mythical personages and historical
28

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
characters, read his Lives of Theseus
and of Romulus, and compare them
with the Lives of the Emperors Galba
and Otho, or of Mark Antony and
Tiberius Gracchus.
Dryden, one of the greatest of Eng
lish literary critics, edited the earliest
important version in English of Plu
tarch's "Lives." What he said of
them may well be repeated in these
later times, when erudition has grown
to immense proportions but taste is
as rare as it always was. "In read
ing Plutarch," he says, "the following
points should be remembered. He is a ^
moralist rather than a historian. His
interest is less for politics and the
changes of empires, and much more for
personal character and individual ac
tion and motives to action; duty per
formed and rewarded; arrogance chas- '
tised, hasty anger corrected; humanity, ^
fair dealing, and generosity triumphing
29

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
in the visible, or relying on the invisi
ble world. His mind in his biographic
memoirs is continually running on the
Aristotelian Ethics and the high Pla
tonic theories which formed the reli
gion of the educated population of his
time." One other biographical gem comes
to us from antiquity — the brief sketch
of Agricola, by Tacitus, the Roman his
torian who was Plutarch's contempo
rary. In general plan and in topics
chosen by the biographer to be em
phasized, it resembles a Plutarchian
sketch, but in literary treatment it
could have been written only by the
tersest of prose masters. Tacitus also
indulges in pithy moral reflections.
Perhaps I ought to mention the "Life
of Apollonius of Tyana, " by Philostra-
tus, although I have my doubts. It
is not a normally planned and regu
larly conducted biography, but it
30

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
has remarkable value as a symptom.
Apollonius was a Pythagorean ascetic,
born in Cappadocia, who flourished at
the beginning of the Christian era.
From his boyhood he gave himself up
to a pious life. He ate no meat; he
dressed only in linen, the fur and wool
of animals being unclean; he dedicated
himself to chastity, and renounced the
world and its pleasures in order to dwell
among sages; he practised the Pythag
orean rule of silence for five years.
Not only did wisdom, capable of en
trancing the masses, flow from his lips,
but he performed miracles and was
recognized as a great magician. Mod
esty seems to be the only virtue which
he did not posses.s in full measure, if it
be true that he boasted of being able to
speak all languages without ever hav
ing learned them. But as the account
which we have of him probably dates
from more than a century after his
31

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
death, perhaps the boastful quality
may have been added by tradition.
In Rome he raised a noble lady from
the dead. He travelled not only to
Nineveh and India on the east but to
Spain on the west; and even during the
period when he observed silence he had
the power, by a gesture or the change
of expression in his face, to move and
control multitudes. The reports of his
travels read like the "Arabian Nights."
Many of his contemporaries revered
him whilst living as a deity, and for
three centuries or more after his death
people flocked to his shrines. Some
persons called him an impostor; some
a magician; some a god. He typifies
the Holy Man during the last stage of
Paganism, who had much in common
with the Hindu ascetics, and was a
precursor of the early Christian ascetics
in the East.
In reading Philostratus's life of him
32

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
you will be kept on the alert to deter
mine what parts are biographical and
what parts are typical, and would ap
ply to any Holy Man of his period.
The fact that the cult of Apollonius is
believed by some scholars to have been
promoted by the adherents of vanish
ing Paganism in order to check the
just rising cult of Christ, adds to the
interest of the book.
I do not think that we need to pause
and examine any of the other ancient
biographers. The lives they wrote did
not add new qualities to the Art of
Biography. The lives of the Caesars,
by Suetonius, are, of course, famous,
and they hold their popularity down
to the present. But they are uncritical
and they show no real insight into char
acter, and Classicists to-day, who know
the field, distrust the accuracy of some
of Suetonius's details. He revelled in
personal anecdotes, many of which
33

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
amuse us, but, as a modern critic re
marks: "He panders rather too much
to a taste for scandal and gossip."
Nor did they reveal any genius in the
writer comparable to that of Plutarch
or of Tacitus. If you read the "Life of
Nero" by Suetonius and compare it
with the "Life of Alcibiades" by Plu
tarch, you cannot fail to detect the shal
lowness of the Roman writer compared
with the depth of the Greek. Sue
tonius tells us of things on the surface,
the gossip and innuendos and the mad
and cruel acts. Plutarch, on the other
hand, reveals to us the abiding char-
-y acter of Alcibiades — the very logic of
him, so to speak. Yet in many re
spects Alcibiades equalled Nero in
abnormality. The constant direction in the evolu-
;^^. tion of Biography has been from the
outward to the inward. At first the
chief effort was to describe the external
34

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
man, the rank or position he filled and ^
his visible acts. Kings, generals, and
other conspicuous persons furnished
the usual theme. Gradually, however,
writers came to see that a king, in spite
of his supreme station, might be very
dull and uninteresting; consequently,
they fixed their attention on persons
who, being intrinsically interesting, did
not require the fortuitous spotlight of
a proud race or a high station. They
came to perceive, also, that the motive y
behind the deed was the really essential
thing to study and, if possible, to ex
plain or at least to interpret.
The best modern Biography seems
to me to differ from the ancient in just -^
these points. If you turn to literature
you find that a similar development i
has taken place. At first the char
acters in fiction were only slightly-v
individualized. The type prevailed.
Stories dealt with monarchs and heroes,
35

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
and then with nobles, for the every
day public was as eager to know how
the upper classes lived as our public
seems to be inquisitive about the
coming and going, or the dress, sports,
amusements, and scandals of our mul
timillionaires. The average English
shopkeeper probably never spoke to
a duke, but in the pages of a romance
he could learn how dukes, earls, and
barons were supposed to live, and
how they spoke, and even what they
thought. I suspect that the portraits
of most of them, being purely imagi
nary and drawn by authors as igno
rant as their readers, were hardly life
like, but they served. They held the
field for a long time, and they have not
been wholly discarded even now, when
novels of "high life" are greedily de
voured every year.
Earlier, various passions or moods
took possession of the writers of fiction,
36

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
and then the persons they depicted
abounded in sensibility, or in candor,
and, if I may use the expression, their
tears flowed at every pore. Occasion
ally a huge block of actual life, like
Fielding's "Tom Jones," startled the
world into the conviction that truth
surpasses all fictitious imaginings.
From another side, also, came a
strong impulse to express the real,
inner man, not the typical man, the
creature whom convention had agreed
upon. All judges do not look alike or
act alike. All old fathers are not neces
sarily peppery in their temper and ob
durate in their will. Each, being an
individual, should be drawn as an in
dividual. Lyric poets who poured out
their inmost souls in verse, and auto-
biographers who unveiled their most
private thoughts in confessions, im
pressed upon the world the fact that a
real human being was quite unlike the
37

^

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
stiff and affected and really lifeless
contrivances which fashion wished to
substitute. So fiction felt the replenishing and
invigorating influence of these mighty
sources of true passion, and the writers
of Biography were moved, whether they
would or not, by the writers of fiction.
It would be, indeed, a paradox if a bi
ographer, who sets out to describe the
life of an actual person, should make
him less lifelike, less real, than the
novelist succeeds in making the phan
tom offspring of his imagination.
This illustrates how, if you would
understand the growth of the Art of
Biography, you must keep constantly
in mind the parallel growth in the lit
erary arts, especially in those of poetry
and fiction. Nor should I omit paint
ing also, for those who have access to
collections which exhibit the historic
progress of that art. The early paint-
38

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
ers and the Primitives had little skill
in portraiture. They used conven
tional figures for Christ, and the Ma
donna, and others of the holy persons.
The bodies they drew were angular and
anatomically impossible, products of an
age before anatomy had appeared to
suggest that the human fprm may em
body Beauty. Then the painters drew
the faces of their saints from living
models, and in time it came to be fash
ionable to paint a group of portraits
of the family kneeling in adoration of
the celestial personages to whom they
dedicated the altarpiece. Then the art
of portraiture culminated.
In Biography, also, we have similar
stages — Byzantine figures with hardly
a recognizable individual feature, wrists
and ankles that cannot function, and
expression that does not express. Then
the Primitives, and next the coming
to life of individuals, until we reach
39

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
the few consummate biographies which
show us living men, each unlike the
others, with passions, instincts, and
desires, with motives, too, and will,
which guides and governs them all.
From outward to inward — that is
the direction which the Art of Biog
raphy has taken, and that is the direc
tion which every true biographer should
take. Only those who are fooled them
selves, or love to fool others, imagine
that life is nothing but surfaces. And
yet, as we survey History, we come
upon entire generations or epochs in
which mankind seems to be content
with surfaces. By a "gentleman's
agreement" convention is accepted as
sufficient. Traditions may keep alive
the report of a long-past day when mor
als flourished and men believed ar
dently, and tried to practise their belief;
but zeal cooled, the very capacity to
hold a strong belief failed, and hypoc-
40

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
risy, under the guise of convention, or
keeping up appearances, found a way
by lip service to satisfy .the last faint
whispers of the spirit.
Finally, a crust forms over Society,
until there comes a poet or a religious
prophet and breaks this crust and
drops his sounding plummet deep,
deep into the very heart of human
nature, and life wells up again. If
we could analyze any age and discover
to what extent it lived by tradition and
habit, and to what extent it brought
something new of its own, we should
be better able to determine the value
of that age in the march of progress;
the same would be true in the case of
individuals. We should know then
with precision whether a great man
was original, how much he borrowed
either through inheritance or through
contact with his fellows. But this
close measurement, although possible
41

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
to the chemist when he weighs mole
cules and atoms, is still beyond our
scope in dealing with human beings.
Nevertheless, the biographer must do
his utmost to help us to understand in
how far his subject stood on his own
feet and was original, and in how far
he was derived, a product of custom
and the Past, only one specimen of
ten thousand stereotyped in the same
mould. The examples I have given of Bi
ography in antiquity do not touch these
considerations at all. Plutarch's men
are what they are, and never suggest
that he puzzled himself over analyzing
where they got their substance and
qualities, or their originality. Life to
day has become so much a tangle of
problems — moral, religious, social, eco
nomic, hygienic — that we are fortu
nate indeed if we keep any freshness
of youth, any bloom of wonder, for the
42

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
new adventures which meet us on our
journey through it. We have learned
so much about the mechanical and ma
terial forces that, like children with
their toys, we must take apart our ex
periences, even our emotions, even our
love and grief and remorse, and inspect
their mechanism and assure ourselves
that we are getting a normal share of
each; but when we move among Plu
tarch's multitude they seem as natural,
as uncomplicated, as the fields in sum
mer seem to the boys and girls who
play in them, and have not been
weighted down by the knowledge which
converts flowers into botanical speci
mens with Latin names.
The hope of the Biographer should
be to emulate Plutarch in making his
hero natural, and at the same time to
add such information, not technical,
not pedantic, as we more sophisticated
inquirers of the later world crave to
43

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
know. The modern Biographer will
not write to establish a theory or to
illustrate a creed, but he will give the
large and significant human facts in
such a way that the reader who is curi
ous about the theory or the creed will
find his answer in them, while all read
ers will recognize their humanness.
The opinion — I may almost call it
prejudice — prevails that contempo
rary history cannot be impartial, or
fully informed, or final. I heard two
of our historians discuss this matter,
and ask how much time should elapse
before the true history of a significant
episode could be written. One urged
that at least fifty years; the other, who
measured by larger periods, thought
that two or three hundred years would
be required. The same discussion
would apply to Biography, although the
same limits would probably not be re
spected. Most personages who fill a
44

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
large place in popular estimation, while
they live, dwindle very rapidly after
their death, and in even a century
would be forgotten. Nevertheless, the
best biography that could be written
within a few years of their death might
be useful and important. Ought we,
therefore, to observe rigidly the hun
dred-year limit .? I do not think so.
The idea that the actual history or
biography cannot be written until all
the evidence is in seems to me mis
leading. What we get after a hundred
years is a rationalized account, thanks
to which we can pronounce a verdict,
as a judge does. But events as they
happen are seldom rational. They
lack an orderly beginning, middle, and
end, the unexpected plunges in, de
stroys the natural sequence, and turns
the affair off in another direction.
Which of us, in looking back over his
life, can say that all his acts were logical
45

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
or orderly.? You form a partnership
with a man who turns out to be an em
bezzler; illness or accident which you
could not foresee cuts your life in two,
or any other stroke of good or evil for
tune breaks the regular course of your
career. You yourself, writing your au
tobiography, might not be aware of
these or other influences in your devel
opment, but you would realize most
poignantly, perhaps, how it affected
you at the time, and seemed to give a
different direction to your purposes.
In writing history or biography the
first aim should be to tell the story as
nearly as possible as the actors or hero
underwent it. If you are dexterous
you can supply such facts as have sub
sequently come out, to alter the view
we have formed from our knowledge of
its immediate unfolding.
What, for example, is the true story
of the Battle of Waterloo .? Is it the
46

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
cold, dead description which the mili
tary historian can write, having at his
command all the verified details which
have been collected during a century —
an affair to be illustrated by diagrams
and statistics, as passionless as a game
of chess ? — for in such an analysis the
units are treated as being as unhuman
as chessmen are. No, I cannot forget
that every one of the one hundred and
fifty thousand men at Waterloo was a
human being, with a human capacity
for fear or for courage, some of them
intoxicated by the excitement and lust
of battle, and every one of them having
in his heart more than curiosity as to
his individual fate.
Fossil history regards as negligible
what went on in Napoleon's mind and
in Wellington's during the tremendous
vicissitudes of that day. It takes no
count of the fact that throughout the
earlier hours of the battle Napoleon
47

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
issued his orders on the assumption that
Grouchy would arrive in the afternoon.
Fossil history knows that Grouchy was
not coming; it does not pay much at
tention to the desertion of the Dutch
and other regiments, which would have
disconcerted a General less unshakable
than Wellington. No, to treat the acts
and passions which make up history as
dead things is not the highest aim of
the historian. It substitutes intellec
tual processes — analysis, criticism of
evidence, and the passing of judicial
verdicts— for life at white heat. A true
description of the Battle of Waterloo
would make the reader, unless he have
a heart of pumice-stone, thrill as he
sees Ney lead the Old Guard on
its magnificent charge from the little
height of La Belle Alliance down
through the valley, a scant half-mile,
and up the slope of Mount St. Jean,
to break itself against the iron wall of
48

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
Wellington's Redcoats and Grenadiers,
in frantic valor, as surf upon a reef.
Every one of these French Guards rode
impetuously, gallantly, to the attack,
not knowing as we do how it was to
turn out, but conscious of the Old
Guard's long record of glory, never
dreaming that defeat was possible
while Ney led and the Emperor looked
on. A little later in the afternoon, when
an indistinct blur of troops was dis
cerned in the east beyond St. Lambert,
how describe the suspense of each
Commander until he knew whose troops
they were .'' And then, how tell of
Wellington's relief when he found they
were Bliicher's, or Napoleon's surprise
when he learned that they were not
Grouchy's. You can never describe a
battle, or any other historical event
unless you put in the suspense, the pas
sion, the half-knowledge, or complete
49

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
ignorance, which determined its out
come. If the Hindu host had known
that Clive could muster, in compari
son, only a handful of Englishmen at
Plassey, they might not have fled in
rout. Conversely, if the British had
known that the Turkish force at Gal-
lipoli was reduced to three shells, they
would have made a final charge instead
of retreating and abandoning the Dar
danelles. I conclude, therefore, that, although
later history may serve a real purpose
in correcting errors due to contem
porary ignorance or prejudice, the best
history or biography is that which
comes as near as possible to reproducing
the event or the person as in life. If
you wish to describe an eruption of
Vesuvius — to cite an example I have
used elsewhere — you will not be satis
fied to measure the blocks of lava,
which the people of Naples use as pav-
5°

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
ing-stones, but you will seek for the
testimony of those who saw the erup
tion in process. To the imagination
the acts of men seem to pour forth in
perpetual flow from a volcano whose
crater runs down into the Unknown,
and, as you can never counterfeit mo
tion by immobility, or molten lava by
ice, so you cannot make death a sub
stitute for life. Never fear, therefore,
that History or Biography can be too
lifelike; your difficulty will be to find
means through the art of literature to
produce an adequate simulation of life- ^
likeness. Fossil history, fossil biog
raphy cannot satisfy much longer living '
readers. Fossil history knows that
Wellington had received a despatch
from Bliicher saying that he would join
forces with the English on that day.
In reading biographies of men and
women of different times and races we
must be on our guard against the illu-
51

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
sions which mere dress and manners
create. The first morning, when you
walk through Mushki, in Cairo, the
people seem all strange in face and look
and dress, but their strangeness is so
uniform that you fail to detect indi
viduals among them. In a few days,
however, you come to know them as
individuals, to distinguish the Arabs
from the Persians and the Caffirs and
the Hindus; and among these again
you see well-defined varieties. We are
so much the victims of fashion that we
attribute to its observance moral quali
ties, which have little or nothing to
do with it. A soldier who launches
bravely on a perilous cavalry charge
would be covered with mortification,
and would probably retreat if he found
himself in a ballroom without his collar.
But literature and biography should
teach you not to judge by clothes.
Young Abraham Lincoln would have
52

BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
made a poor enough figure on Fifth
Avenue in his deerskin pantaloons,
and it is safe to say that not one of the
cultured and fashionable New Yorkers
who might have met him would have
foreseen that he was to be the greatest
American of the century.
So the Biographer should make it
plain from the start that he introduces
you to a real man or woman, and not
to a lay figure or manikin wearing gar
ments, stylish or otherwise. We will
not dispute that "Manners maketh
man," but manners of this sort spring
from the moral nature or the tempera
ment, and not merely from etiquette.
Etiquette permits mean conduct, vul
garity, dissoluteness, and punishes only
one crime, the crime of being found
out. I ask you to hold these general con
siderations in mind at every point in
our brief study in Biography. Con-
53

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
stantly compare the evolution of this
art with that of Painting and of Fic
tion. And, above all, do not be mis
led by any false or specious arguments
into believing that fossil history or fos
sil biography can ever serve as sub
stitutes for the true. Life has no real
representative except Life, and there
fore the best biography and the best
history are the most lifelike.
We have traced the steps by which
biographers in antiquity arrived at
lifelikeness. More than a thousand
years were to elapse before the appear
ance of the first tentative forerunners
of modern biography.

54

II
FROM MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
BIOGRAPHY
TO imply that the ten or twelve
centuries after Plutarch were bar
ren of biographical material would be
incorrect, for a good many biographies
were written during that period; indeed,
a new and prolific variety sprang up.
I refer of course to the lives or acts of
the saints. With the spread of Chris
tianity, the men and women who were
missionaries and apostles naturally be
came conspicuous. They formed the
dramatis personce of what we may re
gard as the Christian counterpart of the
classical mythology, with its heroes and
demigods. They not only led holy
lives, but they possessed superhuman
faculties, chief among which was the
55

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
power to perform miracles, and, in the
earlier times, when they strove to con
vert Pagans into Christians, they often
suffered martyrdom. The world they
lived in, being wofully ignorant of the
simplest laws of nature, found it easier
to believe than to disbelieve in so-called
miracles. Only by a miracle could the
Saint prove his Saintship.
To an open-minded modern it must
seem queer, to say the least, that it
often took so long for the experts, who
ought to be the best qualified, to dis
cover whether a person was a saint or
not. The pious antics of that most
engaging Spanish nun. Saint Theresa
de Sepeda, for instance, were regarded
with more than suspicion by orthodox
Catholics during her lifetime, but they
were set up forty years after she died
as unquestionable proofs that she was
a saint. More astonishing still is the
case of Joan of Arc, who was recently
56

MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
canonized after she had been dead over
four hundred and eighty years.
"The Lives of the Saints" which
were composed and preserved during
the Middle Age and later, often con
tained delightful traditions about their
subjects, and embodied in this great vol
ume of biographical ingredients there
are probably many true stories of the
way in which simple and devout Chris
tians practised their religion and, if
need be, died for it. But I do not re
call that the writers added anything to
the Art of Biography. If you once ad
mit that a person has the power to
raise the dead, or, when decapitated,
tp walk with his head under his arm,
or to perform any other alleged miracle,
you lose touch with reality so com
pletely that History and Biography
cease to have meaning for you. It
will not do to argue, as many Spiritists
and Occultists argue to-day, that, as
57

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
there are many things in life which we
do not understand, so we must not
assert that the spooks and apparitions
and communications with the dead,
which they declare real, are not real. I
lose interest in reading about the mir
acle-workers, just as I do in reading
about fairy godmothers and the magi
cal personages of the medieval legends.
If you believe literally that a witch can
turn a pumpkin into a coach, and rats
into coachmen, what can't you believe t
There is no farther scope for surprise.
The world becomes topsyturvy and
lawless, and the dwellers in it are in
ferior to the incurable inmates of a
lunatic asylum. Reason too has its
august and holy rights, and those who
flippantly turn their backs upon it to
pursue specious and flimsy phantoms
are not fit to live in this world or any
other which a rational mind can con
ceive of. 58

MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
One real biography shines out upon
us from the Dark Age like the steady
flame of a candle among a throng of
evanescent will-o'-the-wisps. This is
the "Life of the Emperor Charle
magne" (or Charles the Great) by his,
secretary and private chaplain, Egin-
hard or Einhard. He took Suetonius
as his model, and after devoting forty
pages to the wars and political work of
the masterful King, he spends the last
twenty pages on the King's private life
and personal affairs. This part is really
interesting. Einhard, by merely re
citing rather commonplace, human
facts, succeeds in making Charlemagne
live. Although Einhard was a Frank-
ish barbarian, writing in Latin which he
confesses he could not use subtly, he
achieved a recognizable portrait, which
even so slight a trifle as the statement
that the King disliked physicians be
cause they prescribed boiled meats, and
59

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
he insisted on eating his roasted, fills
out. Einhard does not write a delib
erate eulogy, but he tells only the noble
or worthy things about his master,
whom he so evidently reveres, that it
would be sacrilege for him to set down
any blemishes. Thus he speaks of
Charlemagne's great affection for his
daughters. The King loved them so
much that he insisted on having them
always near him, and would not allow
them to marry, and he pretended to be
unaware that they led immoral lives,
which gave rise to much scandal.
As we hold Einhard's little Essay in
our hand and reflect that it contains
much of the vital contemporary knowl
edge of Charlemagne which has come
down to posterity, and look at the ten
massive volumes of Nicolay and Hay's
"Abraham Lincoln," we understand
the immense advantage which the mod
ern hero has over the medieval or the
60

MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
ancient in securing a written monument
of his career. David Masson erected a
similar monument in "The Life of John
Milton and the History of His Time."
But after a thousand years how many
persons, do you think, will read these
encyclopedic works ? Nicolay and Hay
will be consulted as long as Lincoln is
remembered, but to be read is quite
another matter. After eleven hundred
years, however, we read Einhard's
sketch of Charlemagne, for it takes but
an hour. The bullet journeys farther
than the boulder.
Charlemagne stands as a colossal
monarch at the beginning of the Middle
Age. Louis IX of France stands at its
close, not equal to Charlemagne in
significance, but still a very important
and interesting sovereign, who had the
good fortune of having his life told in
one of the most delightful biographies,
ancient or modern. Jean, Sire de Join-
6i

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
ville, wrote it, a noble who was among
the King's intimates in war and peace.
Out of his great love and reverence he
composed a work which, although it
added little to the Art of Biography, is
a real addition to the world's source of
pleasure, being itself a work of art.
You will not find an orderly or con
secutive narrative of the career of Saint
Louis, but you will find his most im
portant events properly described, and
you will be able to look, as through
peepholes, into his very heart. Not
merely that; you will become ac
quainted with the Barons of France
and the other Crusaders who devoted
themselves to the King's service, and
you will understand the motives and
practices of an entire caste, the caste
which was swayed by the ideals of
Chivalry. Next to Saint Louis, Join-
ville himself may be regarded as the
hero of the book, because he pours out
62

MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
in it his own likes and dislikes, and his
criticism of men and of policy.
I find him an agreeable companion.
Fashion in modern biography does not
approve the too frequent intrusion of
the biographer himself, or his opinions.
But any reader who quarrels with Join-
ville on this score must be a rigid for
malist in danger of petrifying into a
pedant; and pedants are beyond the
reach of the divinest art. Some one
has suggested that Joinville comes sec
ond between Villehardouin and Frois
sart among the old French historians,
and that he embodies the manhood
prime of that state of society, just as
Froissart represents its decadence.
Joinville describes to us men and
women who actually believed in Chiv
alry, and lived it, and joyously served
their sovereign, who was to them both
king and model. The people of that
age, however, had another ideal ot
63

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
sainthood, and Francis of Assisi was its
edifying pattern.
The book entitled "The Little
Flowers of St. Francis," probably
written by an unknown monk of the
thirteenth century, is not a formal
biography, but a collection of the say
ings and acts of St. Francis told most
naively and sweetly. The Saint could
not have written an autobiography,
because for him to narrate himself
many of his miracles and benevolent
acts, would seem indelicate. But, for
accomplishing the purpose which the
author intended, he could have em
ployed no better form of composition.
After reading the Fioretti you feel that
you know St. Francis, and you are so
thoroughly imbued with the uncritical,
myth-making, and miracle-seeing world
in which he lived that it all seems very
natural. You follow intimately the
every-day life of a holy person at the
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MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
end of the Middle Age, who devoted
himself to altruistic work.
In the " Imitation of Christ," which
was written in the fifteenth century,
and Thomas a Kempis still seems to
have the best claim to be its author,
we meet the third type of medieval
personality, the man who was wholly
absorbed in his religious meditations,
prayers, and self-depreciations. It is
an unapproached record of the ascetic,
who strives almost frantically to save
his own soul. Some one has remarked
that from first to last he is so obsessed
by this purpose that he never mentions
saving the soul of, or even helping,
any one else. And yet Christ bade us
give up our individual life for the
sake of another, and find our own
soul by losing it for the sake of an
other. These three books which portray, in
St. Louis the Christian knight and cru-
65

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
sader performing his duty according to
the ideals of chivalry; the Christian
St. Francis seeking altruistic ideals;
and the Christian ascetic imprisoned
in himself, desperately clutching at the
salvation of his own soul, reveal to us,
by biography and by pseudo-biography,
many most characteristic elements of
Medieval Man.
Coming down a century and a half,
the next example I shall mention is the
"Life of Cardinal Wolsey," by his
Gentleman Usher, George Cavendish.
Wolsey, you will remember, was both
an ecclesiastic and the chief adviser of
Henry VIII — one of those double-
natured men, a layman on one side
and an official churchman on the other,
several of whom, before and after the
Reformation, served as prime ministers
for the monarchs of Spain, France, and
England. He belongs in the list with
Ximenes, Richelieu, Mazarin, Fleury,
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MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
and Alberoni. Judged by whatever
standard, Wolsey, the butcher's son,
was one of the greatest of English
statesmen — the first, I should say, who
had a vision of England as a dominant
force in the world-politics of that era.
Cavendish's "Life" of him is much
more personal than political, so that
any one who reads it for a forthright
narrative of events will be disappointed.
But if you read it as a biography which
gives in a series of memorable pictures
the important crises in an extraordinary
career, you will not be disappointed.
The steps by which the humble butch
er's son was befriended and sent to
Oxford, where he graduated at fifteen
and then took orders, and was rapidly
promoted, became chaplain to Henry
VII at thirty-four. Dean of Lincoln at
thirty-seven, Almoner to Henry VIII
the next year. Bishop of Lincoln at
forty-three, and Archbishop of York
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THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
the same year [1514], and Cardinal the
next year, are briefly indicated.
But the substance of the book relates
to Wolsey's close companionship with
the headstrong and vicious Henry VIII.
Among the paradoxes of history at
which we have a right to smile is the
English Reformation, promoted by
Wolsey to gratify the temporal ambi
tion of the young king, while he himself
was intriguing to be made Pope of the
Roman Church, from which he was
really separating England. The reader
of Cavendish, however, is likely to re
member longest those passages in which
the biographer describes the eclipse of
his master. What can be more piti
able, for instance, than the death-bed
scene, in which the Cardinal is deserted
by every one except Cavendish and a
few devoted followers, and is not even
allowed to die in peace by the rapacious
and heartless King? Having heard
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MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
that Wolsey, in his disgrace, still had
a few hundred pounds, which the royal
vultures had been unable to scent and
seize, Henry despatched a messenger,
a "Mr. Kingstone," to demand them
of the dying man. And so true a ser
vant of Henry was Mr. Kingstone that
he almost interrupted the administer
ing of extreme unction to the fast-
failing Cardinal.
Although Cavendish can hardly be
claimed as an innovator in Biography,
those passages of his which I refer to
show that he was sensitive to the im
portance of personal details — a direc
tion in which the Art was to develop
until it reached its highest expression.
History shows few examples of the
fall of a mighty personage from tower
ing splendor and domination into the
dust, equal to Wolsey's, and in Caven
dish's simple narrative the tragic con
trast is all the more impressive because
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THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
of the absence of all effort to produce a
melodramatic effect. We see Wolsey's
utter surprise and blank amazement at
it. We see also how it sobered and sad
dened the honest Cavendish, who could
not understand how such a calamity
could, by God's Providence, be allowed
to strike down such a man. That the
truly great statesman Wolsey should
be the sport and victim of the violent
and lascivious Henry and his shameless
paramour Anne Boleyn, sorely tested
Cavendish's religious trust. His bi
ography illustrates how much the pe
culiar qualities of the biographer help
to make or mar a biography. In truth,
the ideal biographer is one who is so
sensitive to his subject's qualities that
he, better than any one else, perceives
them. He may not be a master in the
art of expression, but if his divination
is sure, this lack also may be compen
sated. No one can doubt this in the
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MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
case of Cavendish, who saw the good
side and the noble of his master, who
gave his own affection free rein and
dedicated himself nearly thirty years
later to publish to the after-world
Wolsey's true story.
By reading that story and by com
paring it with Shakespeare's portrait
of Wolsey in King Henry VIII you can
see the difference in method between
a sympathetic chronicler and the great
est of dramatists. Cavendish makes
Wolsey say: "If I had served God as
diligently as I have the king, he would
not have given me over in my grey
hairs." This becomes, by Shake
speare's magic:
"Oh Cromwell, Cromwell!
Had I but served my God with half the zeal
I served my king, he would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies."
Do we not feel throughout that Shake
speare has almost adopted Cavendish's
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THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
view of the Cardinal ? The words
which he puts into the mouth of
Thomas Cromwell in rebuking Gardi
ner, the Bishop of Winchester, are but
the refrain which murmurs half-plain-
tively from many of the biographer's
pages :
"My Lord of Winchester, you are a little.
By your good favour, too sharp; men so noble.
However faulty, yet should find respect
For what they have been : 'tis a cruelty
To load a falling man."
Shakespeare's other historical plays
abound, of course, in lines and passages
based on Holinshed and other chron
iclers, and no one can fail to perceive
how much he borrowed from Plutarch's
sketch of Julius Caesar for his portrait
of the noblest Roman of them all. To
have inspired Shakespeare would save
Cavendish from oblivion, but the ac
tual worth of the biography will keep
it alive as long as men prize genuine
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MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
fragments of human life and tragic
fortune. One of Wolsey's contemporaries
whose life has lasting smack and flavor
was Sir Thomas More, and his son-in-
law, Roper, wrote a biography which
should be read along with Cavendish's,
by any one who wishes to know the
prevalent ideals in biography toward
the middle of the sixteenth century in
England. The book is also of much
intrinsic interest, as it should be to
give a truthful report of More, in
whom humor and wisdom were finely
blended, and whose character shone
forth nobly in a time of turncoats and
sycophants. In the main, Roper fol
lows without imitating (because, as he
probably never saw Cavendish's book
in manuscript, he could not have imi
tated it) the meandering method of the
"Life of Wolsey." Most biographers
in that age preferred that method. It
73

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
was as if they sat down with you and
talked over the career of their subject,
remembering this or that point as they
talked on, quite indifferent to the
bounds of time and sequence.
The Italian Renaissance produced
one splendid biographical monument,
in the "Lives of the Most Excellent
Painters, Sculptors and Architects,"
by George Vasari. The collection cov
ers the three centuries from Giotto and
the Pisani to Vasari's own contem
poraries, including Titian and Tinto-
ret. The individual sketches, especially
those of the men of the last century
treated by Vasari, are probably more
nearly correct than are those of most
of Plutarch's subjects who lived cen
turies before Plutarch himself wrote.
Vasari may have been personally ac
quainted with the chief Masters of the
sixteenth century, and he heard the
facts and gossip about those whom he
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MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
did not persohally know. You get the
impression, therefore, of the sort of
man each of them was, and you learn
a great many things about his profes
sional career — who employed him, and
how much he was paid. In addition to
all this, Vasari frequently adds his own
criticisms of the paintings, statues, and
buildings, so that you have the stand
ard of art criticism of one of the later
masters of the Renaissance, and what,
ih many cases, was certainly the fash
ionable or orthodox verdict of the
time. Coming back to English writers the
Lives written by Sir Izaak Walton
must not be overlooked. They have
in their way the charm which has de
lighted generations of readers of "The
Compleat Angler," and they describe
men who were themselves interesting.
They are truly landmarks, although in
their composition they represent no
75

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
new advance. Walton was a pains
taking searcher for facts, as his appen
dix to the "Life of Mr. Richard
Hooker" bears witness. But brute
dates and events seem of secondary im
portance compeared with his delightful
gossip about his subjects. I think of
him as on a sunny summer afternoon,
sitting under the shade of a tree and pa
tiently waiting for a fish to bite his
hook, enjoying the angler's mild sus
pense, which does not, however, cut him
off from a cosey and quiet chat with a
friend. How much of himself goes into
his sketches, and how glad we are to
have it !
The personal quality — that deter
mines our likes and dislikes, our pleas
ures and our pains ! Strictly speaking,
of course, we ought to have as little as
possible of the personality of the bi
ographer intruded into his work, and
yet, being human, we not only tolerate
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MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
but enjoy it, when it does not wrong
the truth. And especially to the older
writers, whether Plutarch or Joinville
or Cavendish, we willingly grant the
privilege of expressing their own opin
ions. Although he was not primarily a
biographer, I must not pass over Lord
Clarendon, whose history is rich in
some of the best-drawn portraits in
existence. He had an eye for seeing
features, and complexion, and the play
of expression, and for reproducing
them all on the printed page as won
derfully as Sir Joshua Reynolds does
on canvas. And any one who loves
the splendor of jeweled words, and the
beauty of elegant but unaffected phrase,
glories over the way in which Claren
don knew how to match precious sub
stance with rare style. Those por
traits of his are like the heads cut by
the antique lapidary on emerald or

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
sapphire, and not on common onyx or
carnelian. Perhaps the most personal records
of all are those which cannot be classed
as biographical and yet, nevertheless,
reveal passion at its supreme moments.
Take the "Letters of Abelard and He-
loise": their passion keeps them alive
after eight hundred years. Likewise,
many Autobiographies or Confessions
burn with an undying glow. Much of
the passionate emotion, worship, love,
remorse, and spiritual distress speaks
out of the Old Testament from indi
viduals whose names are forgotten.
The passion lives on, although the
heart which it consumed has van
ished. So I have said nothing about Auto
biography, and the reason must be
evident. Autobiography is not like
Biography, an art whose development
we can trace. It is the record of in-
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MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
dividual lives by the men themselves.
It may be as abstract as are the
Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, and tell
us little about the external life of the
man but unfold to us in the amplest
confidence the very stuff his soul was
made of. The Confessions of St. Au
gustine are equally soul-revelations,
as if the lightnings of the Eternal
flashed down into the Saint's being, and
lighted it up with terrible distinctness.
But how shall we compare his Confes
sions with Rousseau's, or with the as
tonishing revelations of Benvenuto Cel
lini ? We appraise an autobiography
by its representative value and by its
literary expression. Although many
autobiographies do not spring from St.
Augustine's spiritual depths, they are
still precious. Ifyou but analyze your
self truly and have some indefina
ble charm in your nature — something
which you yourself do not suspect, but
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THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
which the world delights in — your
story of yourself is bound to live. It
may be that you have not charm, but
that your experience is so unusual, so
full of real interest, that it will attract
as Solomon Maimon's does, or as
Richard Jefferies's "The Story of My
Heart" does. And, as persons repel
as well as attract, so do their Confes
sions. A literary friend of mine to
whom I had attributed a catholic
taste, tried to read "The Story of My
Heart," and he confessed to me with
a frankness which never deserted him,
that he had found it so abominable
that he burnt it, unfinished, in the
furnace. I have always wondered
what there was in it which so aroused
his indignant aversion.
I was reading lately Lord Morley's
"Recollections," and I laid the book
down with great disappointment.
Why was I disappointed ? Here was
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MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
a work by the foremost man of letters
in England since Tennyson died, a
man who while still very young won
a high place in the esteem of the only
public whose verdict really counts, and
who has continued during half a cen
tury not merely to justify the early
applause but to reach other heights.
A mere author may live aloof from the
world and produce his novels, or poems,
or histories in privacy, as a bird sings
from a tree whose foliage hides him.
But Morley strode into the arena
where every motion of the gladiator is
public, and there he took and gave
blows, and championed the cause of
almost every radicalism which, for good
or for evil, has transformed the com
placent, conservative English-speaking
world of 1850 into the whirling vor
tex of to-day. From publicist and po
lemic he became politician and states
man, and spent thirty-five years in
81

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
Parliament. He fought in the great
battles for Home Rule; he was a Cab
inet Minister and President of the
Council; in menacing crises England
chose him to be Chief Secretary for
Ireland and later Chief Secretary for
India; he was the intimate and con
fidant of Gladstone and his biogra
pher. Better than any one else of his age
John Morley seems to fulfil the ideal
which St. Paul set for himself: he had
unlimited sympathy, and was made all
things to all men by that sympathy.
This does not mean that he gave up
his own essential nature, that he ac
quiesced meanly, or compromised from
a desire to please, or that he was sim
ply a chameleon. It means that he
held in abeyance his idiosyncrasies so
that they should not prevent him from
understanding you perfectly; having
that understanding he could the better
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MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
persuade you, argue with you, perhaps
even win you over.
And yet I was disappointed. The
two volumes of his "Recollections" do
not spring from his heart and passion,
but from his intellect, his fund of infor
mation. The larger part of one volume
is loaded with letters to the Earl of
Minto, the Viceroy of India, which let
us see Lord Morley as a perfect official
letter-writer, abounding in culture, in
special knowledge, and in urbanity,
but never off his guard, never spon
taneous. Read John Stuart Mill's
"Autobiography" in order to perceive
how a man of Morley's type, intellec
tual and rational, can yet jeel and utter
his feeling.
But my theme is Biography and I
touch on Autobiography merely to
show how different it is, and how differ
ent must be the criteria by which we
judge it. As in the case of Fiction,
83

\/

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
however, the influence of Autobiog
raphy on the writing of Biography has
probably been greater than biographers
or readers suspect. When we became
accustomed to the intimate revelations
which persons who wrote their own
lives vouchsafed to us, we came to ex
pect something similar in the portraits
which biographers drew of their sub
jects. The best of all human docu
ments happens to be Boswell's "Life of
Samuel Johnson," and not an Autobi
ography of Johnson by himself; but
the reason why Boswell's work holds
the primacy is precisely because we
feel that it could not have been better
if Johnson himself had written it.
This leads me to remark that the fact
that a man knows himself better than
anybody else can know him does not
necessarily imply that he can write the
best story about himself. This is a
matter of Art rather than of Knowl-
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MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
edge, and I hope later to refer to it
briefly. Johnson's "Lives of the Most Emi
nent English Poets: With Critical
Observations on Their Works" may
be regarded as a monument either in
Biography or in literary criticism. I
believe that current fashion in criti
cism sneers at old Doctor Johnson, and
indeed I doubt whether most of the
critics have ever read him. If he
could glance at those masterpieces
which sometimes live a month which
they load with their praises, I suspect
that he would say: "Tut ! tut ! Sir,
a man might write such stuff forever
if he would abandon his mind to it."*
And yet a mind whose tastes and stand
ards have not been formed by the
literary gossip of newspapers from day
to day will discover in Johnson a
corpus of sound criticism.
* BosweU, IV, i8j.
85

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
The biographical part ofhis "Lives"
is subordinate to the critical. He
gives a straightforward account of a
man before discussing the poems, but
he never fails to note pertinent facts
or illustrative anecdotes concerning the
man as well as the poet. And, like his
own Boswell, he sometimes recalls
mere habits which bring the human
side of his subject nearer to us. Thus,
in his essay on Milton, he mentions
such a detail as this: "When he did
not care to rise early, he had some
thing read to him by his bedside; per
haps at this time his daughters were
employed. He composed much in the
morning and dictated in the day, sit
ting obliquely in an elbow-chair, with
his leg thrown over the arm."
Several other of Doctor Johnson's
"Lives" besides that of Milton, es
pecially those of Dryden, Swift, Pope,
and Savage, are of considerable bulk,
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MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
and as specimens of brief biography
they seem to me to be not inferior to
similar modern examples. The modern
are different in many respects, and
probably the reader to-day finds them
easier to read than he does Johnson,
because they are written in the dialect
of to-day. But I doubt whether, on
the whole, the modern surpass John
son's in fundamental biographical sub
stance. By a singular and happy coincidence
Doctor Johnson found in James Bos
well his perfect biographer. Look at
him from any angle you will, it must
seem incredible that the old Doctor,
with his queer ways, his scrofula, his
tea-drinking, his other-mindedness, his
brusque and almost brutal retorts, his
sordid dwelling, should have been bet
ter known to five generations of Eng
lish-speaking people throughout the
world than any other individual. "He
87

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
had genius," you say, "and the world
is always interested in genius," but
there have been men of far greater
genius than his of whom we have not a
tenth of the personal details that Bos
well has told us of him. Somebody has
reconstructed the life of Frederick the
Great, day by day, from his birth to his
death, but assuredly such a monu
mental monstrosity — worthy to stand
beside the Leipsic Sieges Denkmal —
will never have enthusiastic readers, at
least outside of Germany. And even
there it may require the incentive of a
cash prize to induce many to read it
through. When I apply the phrase
"enthusiastic readers" to Boswell, I am
hardly correct, for those who read him
at all soon rise above the stage of de
monstrative enthusiasm where they
feel that admiring adjectives are as un
necessary as lovers of landscape do,
when they watch a sunset, or a tempest

MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
at sea, or shadows and sunshine at
play among the mountains.
And yet this same James Boswell
who produced the chief masterpiece in
modern biography was long in getting
even a nod of recognition from the
critical public. Everybody saw the
greatness ofhis "Life of Johnson," and
in a very few years after its publication
that book became a part of the intel
lectual equipment of cultivated persons
throughout the English-speaking world,
and it has never ceased to hold this
place. Even now, those who admire
the biography admit only grudgingly
the claims of Bozzy. Nevertheless,
masterpieces are not produced by man
ikins. Sometimes, however, the gulf
of disenchantment opens between the
man and his work. We regret, for in
stance, when we learn of it, the sordid-
ness of J. M. W. Turner's character and
life, and we are glad that oblivion has
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THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
screened us from knowing too much
about the Elizabethan dramatists or
the painters of the Italian Renaissance.
Boswell's bad reputation with pos
terity was fixed by Macaulay, who saw
characters as painters in the Levant
see landscape, a blaze of sunlight
contrasted with unmodulated silhou
ettes and shadows. Macaulay never
wrote a sentence which the youngest
reader could not understand. When,
therefore, he took Boswell for a sitter
he left nothing uncertain, no margin
for speculation, no borderland for
doubt. In many a passage, which
ninety years ago rang with metallic
clearness through the world, he held
poor Boswell up for contempt and
odium. As a model of portraiture
by vituperation, Macaulay's sketch of
Boswell can hardly be matched. Let
me quote a part of a famous passage:
"He was the laughingstock of the
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MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
whole of that brilliant society which has
owed to him the greater part of its
fame. He was always laying himself at
the feet of some eminent man, and beg
ging to be spit upon and trampled
upon. He was always earning some
ridiculous nickname, and then 'binding
it as a crown unto him ' — not merely
in metaphor, but literally. He ex
hibited himself at the Shakspeare Jubi
lee, to all the crowd which filled Strat-
ford-on-Avon, with a placard around
his hat, bearing the inscription of
Corsica Boswell. In his tour, he pro
claimed to all the world, that at Edin
burgh he was known by the appellation
of Paoli Boswell. Servile and imper
tinent, — shallow and pedantic, — a
bigot and a sot, — bloated with family
pride, and eternally blustering about
the dignity of a born gentleman, yet
stooping to be a talebearer, an eaves
dropper, a common butt in the taverns
91

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
ofLondon, — so curious to know every
body who was talked about, that, Tory
and High Churchman as he was, he
manoeuvred, we have been told, for an
introduction to Tom Paine, — so vain
of the most childish distinctions, that,
when he had been to court, he drove to
the office where his book was being
printed without changing his clothes,
and summoned all the printers' devils
to admire his new ruffles and sword; —
such was this man; — and such he was
content and proud to be. Everything
which another man would have hidden,
— everything, the publication of which
would have made another man hang
himself, was matter of gay and clamor
ous exultation to his weak and diseased
mind." It happens that Carlyle wrote about
Boswell at the same time as Macaulay.
He had the same facts to draw his in
ferences from. He, too, knew all of
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MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
Boswell's foibles and the many tradi
tions, mostly disparaging, which circled
round his reputation. Nevertheless,
Carlyle discovered in Boswell some
thing which Macaulay did not see. In
his impetuous, deeply penetrating, pas
sionate strokes, he says:
"Boswell was a person whose mean
or bad qualities lay open to the general
eye; visible, palpable to the dullest.
His good qualities, again, belonged not
to the time he lived in; were far from
common then; indeed, in such a de
gree were almost unexampled; not
recognizable therefore by every one;
nay, apt even (so strange had they
grown) to be confounded with the very
vices they lay contiguous to and had
sprung out of. That he was a wine-
bibber and gross liver; gluttonously
fond of whatever would yield him a
little solacement, were it only of
a stomachic character, is undeniable
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THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
enough. That he was vain, heedless,
a babbler; had much of the sycophant,
alternating with the braggadocio, curi
ously spiced too with an all-pervading
dash of the coxcomb; that he gloried
much when the tailor, by a court-suit,
had made a new man of him; that he
appeared at the Shakspeare Jubilee
with a ribbon imprinted 'Corsica Bos
well,' round his hat; and in short, if
you will, lived no day of his life without
doing and saying more than one pre
tentious ineptitude: all this unhappily
is evident as the sun at noon."
Here you see are the same elements,
and yet the impression left upon you
is not that of despising or loathing, but
rather that of suspended judgment.
Admitting that Boswell had all these
defects, Carlyle lets you imply that the
cheap and tawdry fellow still possessed
qualities which would retrieve him.
Carlyle himself looked through the
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MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
eyes of Sympathy, without which we
cannot well understand the hearts of
men and the mainspring of causes.
Would it not be an astonishing thing
if a poor wine-bibbing fop — and noth
ing more — were capable of creating a
really stupendous work in art or litera
ture ? A common ruffian in the dig
gings of the Klondike may find the
largest gold nugget on record, or a slave
in the diamond fields of Golconda may
unearth a Koh-i-noor; but a work of
art, a true book or painting, a statue
or temple, does not exist ready-made,
needing only to be discovered by some
fortunate finder. The work of art is a
creation, and it can never come into
being without the transmuting agency of
the artist. Accordingly, James Boswell
must receive the credit for the unique
qualities which produced his "Life of
Samuel Johnson." Do not suppose that
it was his wine-bibbing, or his syco-
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THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
phancy, or his fribbling vanity, or any
other of his foibles which qualified him
for his Biography. In all cases where
the artist seems unworthy of his work,
remember Emerson's truth:
"Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought."
What is the secret of Boswell's mas
tery ? First, and second, and third, he
was a highly sensitized photographic
plate, receptive to the most delicate
impressions from Johnson. He saw
everything, he preserved everything,
but his sympathy kept him from mis
interpreting the old Doctor's words and
gestures and acts. Boswell is there as
a transparent glass through which you
look at the real Johnson. The glass
is not tinged or flecked to give you a
Boswellian distortion. Next to his
gifts of transparency and of receptivity
and of sympathy comes his gift of selec-
96

MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
tion. This is the distinctive talent of
the artist, and with him it seems to
have been intuitive. He knew just
what to choose among his mass of ma
terials, and he chose so naturally that
there seems to be no art at all. He had,
too, the gift of emphasis, which is only
another form of proportion.
Almost equally rare as these gifts
was his power of expression., or literary
style. Most persons think that he had
no style. You read him page by page,
and chapter by chapter, and are never
conscious of his style. Therein lies its
excellence. As you read you see the
things he tells about and you remem
ber the episode but not the words
he used. Transparency, in which the
author does not project himself be
tween the reader and the text, is again
the talent. You have only to reflect
what the four volumes of the Biography
of Johnson would be if they were
97

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
written by Walter Pater or any other
of the much lauded and festooned
official modern "stylists," in order to
thank God that James Boswell was
none of them. We relish a little guava
jelly now and then, but the mere
thought of it through four octavo vol
umes gives one nausea.
I make no attempt to discover why
it is that Samuel Johnson, described
in the minutest details by his devoted
biographer, should so captivate genera
tion after generation of readers. One
evident attraction is Johnson's wit.
We are too apt to think of him as the
exploiter of a ponderous style, as being
elephantine in his person and move
ments, and as a pompous literary auto
crat; but what made him triumph, in
spite of all these, was wit, at once
quick and sharp and sound — for real
wit must spring from sound ideas or
it is merely a verbal play or a trick of
98

MEDIEVAL TO MODERN
expression. Nearly one hundred and
forty years after his death, I find in
Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations" al
most a hundred of Johnson's sayings
in prose, some of which are like house
hold words and every one of them has
his peculiar stamp. How many of the
professional wits to-day will be thus
lavishly quoted in the year 2060 ? Mr.
Bernard Shaw makes us laugh, but his
persiflage compared with Johnson's
fundamental wit seems no more last
ing than is the effervescence on a
noisy sparkling stream.
In our present survey of the devel
opment of the Art of Biography, Bos
well's masterpiece is the culmination.
It gave, for the first time, a complete
account of a human being. In it we
have not merely the external man
and a narration of his acts, but the
inside as well as the outside, all ade
quate to the original. The wise Bos-
99

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
well does not use Johnson as a figure
on whom to drape any theory or his
own prejudices. His vision penetrates,
not because he has an eager and keen
mind which delights to exercise itself
in such analysis, but because he has
sympathy and love which not only see
but understand. And, whether by in
tuition or by intent, he commands a
style which is a perfect medium for
his thoughts. Finally, he has for a
subject a creature strange, but with
a strangeness which attracts every
one, and still, after these many, many
years, has not worn out the world's
interest.

lOO

Ill
BIOGRAPHY IN THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY
A GOOD many years ago, when
¦^ *¦ Mr. Howells was fighting man
fully his campaign for Realism, he re
marked that if the novelist could get
inside of the heart and brain of a
moke, smoking his corn-cob pipe on a
log, he could produce a portrait which
would throw Shakespeare's Hamlet,
or any other masterpiece, into the
shade. I do not believe that this is
literally true. I do not believe that
the brain of any moke, or of any per
son now living, be he white, black,
yellow, or mottled, could match Shake
speare's brain in interest. Providence
has ordered it so that, although we are
all made of the same stuff, that stuff
IOI

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
has innumerable varieties, and, hu
manly speaking, those varieties are
not equal in interest, in charm, or in
beauty or significance. But we see
what Mr. Howells meant, and the frag
ment of truth in his meaning. And
there are many biographies to prove
that the excellence and interest of a
biography do not depend upon the high
position of its subject. If only the bi
ographer can pluck out the heart of a
man or woman, no matter how hum
ble, and reveal it truly, the world will
rejoice. The modicum of truth which the
Realist's doctrine contained, passed
into fiction and other forms of litera
ture, and into painting and into sculp
ture. The penalty exacted for estab
lishing any truth is exaggeration, and
for a good while Realism ran to all
lengths. No matter how; inane or
sordid or putrescent a story might be,
I02

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
if it were only sufficiently strewn with
dirt, the Realists hailed it as a master
piece; but in the long run the taste
of the human soul is more to be relied
upon than is that of any doctrinaire,
and the time came when the human
soul repudiated the creed of dirt for
dirt's sake. But the good which Real
ism had to offer remained, and we see /s / ^
the result in Biography not less than
in Fiction.
The best biographies written since
1870 are much closer to life than those
of the middle and earlier part of '
the nineteenth century. Of course the
adoption of the scientific method, in ^
following which men studied other
men, including celebrities, as dispas
sionately as they studied animals or
chemical elements, exerted a struc- '^
tural influence over biography.
Formerly, if a biographer were writ
ing about a statesman, for instance,
103

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
he instinctively carried in his mind the
ideal of how a statesman ought to be
portrayed; in like fashion the sculptor
draped him in a toga, holding a scroll
of orations in his left hand. This
served as well as a sign-board to warn
you that the subject was a statesman
and orator, and to prepare you to ex
amine the statue properly. If you will
compare Stanhope's "Life of William
Pitt the Younger," with John Morley's
"Life of Gladstone," you will perceive
the change that had come about in less
than a hundred years, in the writing of
biographies of statesmen; and even
Mr. Morley was less "Realistic" than
is Mr. Winston Churchill in his life of
his father, Lord Randolph Churchill.
This was to be expected, for Mr. Glad
stone was almost a symbol, and in his
life he passed through the typical Eng
lish experiences at school, at the Uni
versity, in the Anglican Church, and
104

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
in Parliament, which made him in some
respects rather the carrier-on and em
bodiment of traditions, than a highly
individualized person. In their con
servatism the English still cling to the
medieval habit of setting the Place
above the Man. They write about the
Regius Professor at Oxford, or the
Dean of St. Paul's, or the Archbishop
of Canterbury without giving their
family names, so that unless you have
these, and a thousand others stored
away- in your memory, you must con
sult some reference book in order to
discover who the Professor was, or the
Dean in 1830, or in i860.
This English practice partly ac
counts, I think, for the difference be
tween English and American biogra
phies of officials. We speak of John
C. Calhoun and not of the Senator
from South Carolina, of Phillips Brooks
and not of the Protestant Episcopal
105

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
Bishop of Massachusetts, of John Mar
shall and not of the Chief Justice of
the United States, and so of all the
rest, whom we refer to by name and
not by title, unless there is a particular
reason for giving the title. The texture
of the lives led by the Americans was
also so fresh and unconventional that
it furnished little excuse for imitating
the English practice in terminology.
In England the successful man, what
ever his profession, rose to this or that
office, which may have existed for gen
erations, and so it was natural for him
to be known by the office or rank. In
the United States, on the other hand,
the pioneer in one decade might be a
State Governor or a Bishop or a Gen
eral in the next, and so he was known
for himself, and not for his office. A
perfect example is Abraham Lincoln,
whom the most conventional of English
biographers would find it impossible
io6

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
to de-individualize. Speaking of Lin
coln, let me commend, in passing, a
recent biography of him by Lord
Charnwood, who, though not an Ameri
can, has succeeded in a remarkable
way in understanding what I may call
the Americanism of Lincoln and of his
environment. We might suppose that having
reached in Boswell's "Johnson" the
culmination of the biographical art, we /
need not pursue our examination far
ther. But, in fact, evolution does not
necessarily stop with the creation of a
perfect specimen, and the nineteenth
century and our own have produced
many sorts of biography which call for
our attention. It took a long time for
Boswell's example to influence other
biographers. The traditional idea con
tinued that biographies must be con- v^
structed according to well-recognized
patterns. Just as the "dignity ofhis-
107

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
tory" had to be respected, so respect
for the "proprieties" had to be ob
served. The intimate life of a man,
his every-day doings, his weaknesses
and follies and mistakes, must not be
mentioned. But he must be described
as being perpetually on parade, the
counterpart of the portraits of men in
their best apparel. This fashion has
by no means passed away. I read re
cently a book of General Robert E.
Lee, which was so stuffed with virtues
that I began to doubt the existence of
any virtue, and only when the author
stated that General Lee used to take
his ease in a rocking-chair, sitting in
his stocking-feet, did I perceive that
he was a real person.
I must forego any attempt to criti
cise in detail even the foremost of
modern biographies, but I shall touch
upon several of them which are rep
resentative. Earliest among the Brit-
io8

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
ish is "Letters and Journals of Lord
Byron, with Notices of his Life," by
Thomas Moore, which was published
in 1830. I can hardly overpraise By
ron's own material, which forms a con
siderable part of this work. To me
he seems the best of English letter-
writers, in the sense that he was the
most spontaneous, and, so to speak,
reckless, uttering his thought or whim
of the moment without concern for
publication or discretion. Most of
the other famous letter-writers are
conscious that posterity is looking
over their shoulder while they write.
With Stevenson a letter was not like a
private, unpremeditated chat with a
friend, but a set literary performance,
in which all was premeditated and
wrought with his highest skill as a
literary artist.
The substance of Byron's Letters is
often disappointing, because it belongs
109

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
to the baser side of his nature, and we
are irritated and grieved to find a genius
like his seeming to prefer the lower
levels. But as human documents his
journals, and especially his letters, are
invaluable. Moore's connecting nar
rative, though in the main good, is
not remarkable. He wrote as a prac
tised literary man, not as a born bi
ographer. His style is smooth and
rather graceful, but more antiquated
now than Boswell's, and he evidently
suffers by contrast with the rush and
vividness and humor and finality of
Byron's. Like most of us Moore used
a trowel; Byron carried a poniard.
We smile now or moralize as we re
member that, a century ago, some of
the critics esteemed Moore as superior
to Byron, even in poetry; and they
regarded Byron as the luckiest of men
to have Moore for a biographer.
This merely illustrates the wide-
no

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
spread fallacy which still survives |
that anybody can write a biography. ||
Moore, being a popular poet, must
necessarily be a great biographer; but
they would not have predicted that
he would be the best man to choose-
to compose a symphony or to paint
a portrait. This sophism runs through
almost every stratum. Formerly, when
any distinguished citizen — lawyer or
judge, merchant or writer — died, it
was taken for granted that his clergy
man, if he had one, would write his
life, unless his wife, sister, or cousin
were preferred — a still more foolish
custom. I recall only one biography
by a widow which was really success
ful, Mrs. Kingsley's "Life of Charles
Kingsley." On the other hand, I could
mention several which were marred
because the widow interfered with the
biographer, or even guided the pen while
the biographer wrote. After the family
III

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
have found a writer whose judgment and
discretion they can trust, they should
religiously refrain from meddling. A
witty English friend of mine, whose
cousin. Sir Alfred Lyall, was writing
the life of Lord Dufferin, said to me:
"I think Sir Alfred would agree with
you, that suttee should be made com
pulsory on the widows of celebrities."
The next important biography in
English to follow that of Byron was
Lockhart's "Life of Scott." It added
no new variety to the art, but it is an
admirable example of excellence with
out originality. Lockhart wrote well.
He avoided passing fashions in style;
he adhered to a chosen vocabulary and
to a chosen scale. He felt emotions
himself and he could describe them in
Scott, and he possessed the rare gift
of being simple, when the emotions
themselves were most intense.
But Lockhart's defect was in draw-
112

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
ing his portrait on too vast a scale.
His biography stretches to nine vol
umes, some four thousand octavo pages.
What an elephantine gift to hand on
to poor Posterity, our after-comer,
imaginary like Sairey Gamp's Mrs.
Harris, who is to read all the books
which we leave unread, to crown with
laurel the innumerable heads of genius
which we neglected, to convert, by
some strange alchemy, our mountains
of lies into truth, and to do justice to
unhonored reputations !
Lockhart narrates in too great detail;
he lacks that power of selection which
stamps the man of genius in any art.
He quotes too copiously from Scott's
letters and journals. Scott, unlike By
ron, not being a vivacious and swift
letter-writer, does not provide first-
rate biographical material in his corre
spondence. He is informational rather
than imaginative or temperamental.
"3

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
A wiser selector than Lockhart would
have made a separate work of Scott's
journals of travel — as Boswell pub
lished Johnson's "Journey to the West
ern Isles of Scotland." But, after all,
Scott was so nobly human in nature,
so true in heart, so wholesome, that I
find it hard to blame Lockhart for tell
ing us too much about him.
Selection ! the discerning Greeks did
not make a Muse of her because they
took it for granted that she was a neces
sary part of every Muse. During the
past century she has been the most
neglected of all. Time was when an
author or other artist worked only un
der the stress of a compelling inspira
tion. But, among moderns authorship
I or the other arts is a trade. Only
I early death can prevent a novelist
I to-day from filling a ten-foot book-
I shelf. Our leading American master
of fiction has eighty volumes or more
114

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
to his credit. Carlyle, as has been
well said, preached the fatuity of speech
and the excellence of silence in twenty
large volumes. Balzac left three times
that number, and the prolific Alexandre
Dumas, pere, has been explained as a
syndicate and not as an individual.
Victor Hugo — but why go on ? The
multi-vocal H. G. Wells gets out three
books a year; much must be allowed,
however, to the pioneer who, as early
as 1918, amazed the world by discov
ering God; and, since Mr. Wells has a
remarkable business sense, we may be
sure that he took out a patent on his
discovery. Does not this volubility imply, as I
just said, that writing no longer waits
on inspiration ? Your successful nov
elist turns out his two thousand or two
thousand five hundred words a day,
as regularly and with as little wear
and tear on his brain as your popular
"5

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
baker achieves his daily stint of mix
ing, cutting, and frying a thousand
doughnuts. Writing and baking have
become trades.. This result is con-
firmed by biographers also; for, as I
have remarked, modern biography has
been noticeably affected by fiction.
In England financial motives have also
caused biographies, as well as novels,
to swell in bulk. For a long time three
volumes was the accepted limit of a
novel, that limit being fixed by the
willingness of a sufficient number of
buyers to pay a guinea for a three-
volume novel. Latterly, when four
or five shillings, or seven and six, mark
the price which the greatest number of
readers will pay for their fiction, the
text is correspondingly shortened. For
a long time past a guinea has been the
traditional sum to be paid for a bi
ography, and, as no publisher could
give, without blushing, less than two
ii6

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
volumes of paper, binding, and press-
work for that figure, biographies have
been written to fill two volumes.
Hence the appalling list of two-volume
lives of British statesmen and ecclesi
astics, irrespective of the fact that
many of them could be adequately em
balmed in a hundred pages, whereas
a few of the others might deserve a
thousand pages. The standard of bi
ography is set by fashion and the pub
lishers at two volumes, but Mr. Glad
stone and some bishops and archbishops
be so strong that they come to three
volumes. What becomes of the artist — and,
as I have so often insisted, the biog
rapher must be an artist — if he is
forced, for the pecuniary profit of his
publisher, to ignore his art and to in
flate three or four signatures of text
into a thousand pages? Even biog
raphers who are above sacrificing any
117

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
ideal for commercial reasons, often
fail because they have neither the re
quirements of art nor any training.
Mrs. Charles Kingsley, for example,
wrote her life of her husband in two
volumes, but she subsequently re
duced it to one, and the improvement
must be evident to every reader.
In judging novelists and biographers,
therefore, we must understand what
size convention prescribed for their
works. Suppose that a sculptor had
to make his statues, irrespective of their
subjects, of the same dimensions, be
cause he could procure packing-boxes
of only one size to ship them in, what
would become of the art of sculpture ?
The true biographer, however, writes
neither to fill out nor to curtail, but to
present his subject in just proportion.
The reaction of fiction on biography
conduced to improve the substance
of biographical writing, by forcing it
Ii8

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
to be more vivid, more lifelike. Read
ers who found the phantoms which the
imagination of Thackeray and Dickens
and George Eliot created as lifelike as
themselves, would not tolerate the bi
ographies in which real persons were
more unsubstantial than phantoms.
Why, they ask, should Colonel New-
come and Becky Sharpe, David Cop-
perfield and Lady Dedlock, Tito Me-
lema and Maggie Tulliver, or George
Meredith's Richard Feverel and Sir
Willoughby Patterne, live and breathe,
and be as actually our companions as
are our most intimate friends, while the
lay figures whom biographers set up and
call by the names of historic persons
are as dead as mummies, or even as
fossils ? Insensibly, therefore, fiction
set an example in vitality to the bi
ographers. Further, from the middle ofthe Nine
teenth Century on. Science began visibly
119

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
/ to affect both these arts. For Science
studied an animal, a flower, a tree, dis
passionately and with the utmost thor
oughness. Science used a microscope,
and the public, becoming gradually ac
customed to the way in which Science
described its specimens, instinctively
looked for a similar method when bi
ographers and novelists portrayed their
subjects. In the end the scientific
method, applied to the arts, defeated
its purpose by substituting material
and mechanical standards for spiritual.
Science can vivisect bodies, but up to
the present the soul of man eludes the
microscope and the scalpel. The es
sential subject of the biographer is the
soul of man.
I do not like to fix dates because, in
the transition between one social or
intellectual or religious season and
another, there is the same elasticity as
in the passage from spring to summer,
1 20

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
or from autumn to winter. You can
not say absolutely that any day marked
the line of division. The year 1859,
which saw the publication of Darwin's
"Origin of Species," stands out in the X^
retrospect as the beginning of the new
epoch and the end of the old; but we
perceive now that for several years be
fore 1859 the new ideas were in the
air (to use a vague term of that time)
and that for a decade or more after
1859 the old ideas survived, even if
they did not prevail. In Biography, I
think, the most characteristic speci
mens of the changing ideals as to sub- V
stance and method appeared in John
Morley's studies of Voltaire and of
Rousseau. Nothing better of its kind
exists in English so far as I know.
Morley does not attempt to write a
consecutive story of the events which ^
made up the external life of either
man. He gives us, rather, a survey
121

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
of the intellectual and moral develop
ment of each, and, as any of us can
verify by looking over his own ex
perience, this development does not
coincide with external happenings. It
was the discovery of Wordsworth's
poems which revolutionized John
Stuart Mill's inner life, and so almost
every important man acknowledges
that he got a great impetus or perma
nent spiritual direction from some
book or person.
Morley works by what I may call
the oblique method in biography. He
seems to be more bent on criticising
than describing, but when his portrait
is complete you recognize its lifelike
ness. If you watched Monet paint,
you would wonder why he splashed on
one stroke or another, but when you
viewed his finished picture at the proper
distance you would see that every drop
of paint had its purpose, and that not
122

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
a stroke was superfluous. Similarly,
Morley, who was by no means an Im
pressionist, and never splashes on his
colors, achieves the portrait which he
meant to paint.
His evolution as a biographer was so
remarkable that we might well devote
an entire lecture to it. From those
two early monographs of Voltaire and
Rousseau he passed on to not less
searching, though less considerable,
studies of Diderot and other French
men, and of Edmund Burke. This
last seems to me to be the finest sketch
in English of a political philosopher.
But Mr. Morley went on, and in his
"Life of Oliver CromweU" he chose the
dramatic rather than the philosophical
method, and in his "Gladstone" he
combined both kinds in a work which
some persons regard as a salient mas
terpiece in recent biography. Per
haps it is hardly that; it is packed with
123

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
information much of which Morley
only could give, but does it not belong
to the encyclopedic works like Nicolay
and Hay's "Abraham Lincoln," rather
than to the really biographical works
of which Boswell's "Johnson" is the
model? In his "Life of Cobden"
Morley again presents to us the ebb
and flow of great political and economic
forces, with their frequent clash, rather
than the intimate biography of the
Free Trade champion. But this, too,
is legitimate, and indeed in the life of
any statesman the problem of his bi
ographer is to reach a balance between
history and biography, between the
person and the cause. Nor should we
overlook Morley's " Sir Robert Wal
pole," in which he rescues from gener
ations of odium the reputation of a
statesman who really deserved an
honorable fame.
The wonderful Greeks who visualized
124

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
in permanent and vital symbols even
their deepest thoughts, pictured Time,
Chronos, as devouring his children.
His appetite is as insatiable now as
ever. Just as we have come to regard
one fashion as enduring, he creates
another to take its place. Thomas
Carlyle thundered his depreciatory doc
trines on eighteenth-century France
until he had made the world listen to
him and believe; and then, while his
echoes still went reverberating, John
Morley came and taught us, in tones
far less vehement, to see the good in
the France which Carlyle had weighed
and found wanting. Morley's account
of Voltaire, if you seek to know what
Voltaire actually was in Time, will give
you the necessary information. But
for Carlyle Time was always merely a
film, stretching in front of Eternity,
neither wholly transparent nor wholly
opaque. So Carlyle's judgments are
125

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
not those of a decade or a fashion, but
those which conform to the Eternal
Laws, as he saw them. And Voltaire,
or Rousseau, or Mirabeau, have a very
different appearance to the intellect
busied primarily with things temporal,
from what they have when they are
thrown on the screen of things spiritual
and eternal.
During nearly forty years I have
passed through several phases in my
estimate of Thomas Carlyle. He made
^ me a Hero- Worshipper and a Hater of
Shams; he held me spell-bound by his
humor and by the magnificence of
many of his pages; he disclosed to me
Reahty more real than I had found in
any other writer; he spoke to me with
an austerity strangely fascinating, and
in language as rhythmic as the long,
everlasting roll of the sea, messages
that might have come from a Hebrew
prophet. 126

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Then followed a period, not entirely
of disillusion, but of criticism and of
slackened admiration. I perceived his
mannerisms both in diction and in
method. If Nature has mannerisms
she disguises them. Although she
brings us a hundred storms in a year,
each seems original and not an imita
tion of any which went before. I fell
to doubting Carlyle's Eternal Verities,
and I asked myself whether a man who
did not discern a living hero in two of
his contemporaries, like Lincoln and
Cavour, could be trusted to discover
dead heroes in times long past, and to
measure them truly. Having lived
through, if not outgrown, the Age of
Wonder, I hungered for hard, concrete
facts, for Ideals which could be demon
strated, for the logic and continuity
which Science affords us.
Then I entered a third phase, in
which I saw again Carlyle as an amaz-
127

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
ing genius — Carlyle, who flashed into
the very heart and soul of men and
women; Carlyle, who had a special gift
for seeing through many parts of the
film of Time which were opaque to
most of us; Carlyle, who beyond all
other historians understood the terror
of Life and its inexorable doom, in
which each of us has a stake. I de
lighted afresh in his incomparable hu
mor. Who can compare with him in
seizing upon the small, homely, cosey
things ? How he pounces on an ap
parent trifle, which, properly estimated,
was the pivot on which history turned,
— such, for instance, as old Dragoon
Drouet, who, having caught a glimpse
of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette
taking flight in their berline toward
the French border, strides over the
fields by a short cut to Varennes, inter
cepts them there, causes their arrest,
and so turns awry the catastrophe
128

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
of the French Revolution. I doubt
whether any other biographer or his
torian has ever equalled Carlyle in his
genius for discerning the smallest de
tail in externals and in sweeping, as on
a Seraph's wing, over vast generaliza
tions on the inmost meaning of Life.
As a biographer Carlyle is very un
even. Having decided that Frederick
the Great was a hero before he under
took to write about him, he could never
look straight at the man except when
he had magnifying or distorting glasses
on. The result is that Carlyle, the
most insistent of all historians on the
moral interpretation of history, makes
of Frederick the Great, who was really
a monarch without moral sense in
public affairs and the corrupter of the
German people, a hero and model.
No wonder that Carlyle, blinded by
this false simulation of greatness, should
not recognize true greatness in George
129

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
Washington but should sneer at him.
Granted, however, that Frederick's
portrait was to be painted as Carlyle
saw him, what other historian could
equal the variety, the humor, with
which Carlyle painted it ? For life-
likeness it could not be excelled, and
yet it lacks symmetry, compactness,
and the supreme quality of finality and
beauty. If Carlyle only had had more
of the Greek in his make-up ! If
he had only taken the Greek motto
— MrjSev dyav — nothing too much —
which every artist should carry stamped
on his heart ! But he was a Goth,
and the Gothic genius riots in digres
sions and superfluities. He reminds
me of Rembrandt among the painters,
who gets so many of his effects from
shadows and darkness. The figures
in Carlyle's historic dramas seem, like
Rembrandt's portraits, to emerge out
of blackest night into life and color
130

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
before they sink back into blackest
night again.
"We are no other than a moving row
Of magic shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with this sun-illumin'd lantern held
In midnight by the Master of the Show."
Carlyle's "Oliver Cromwell" is an
other masterpiece of interpretation.
In it he exalts another great man who,
it happened, was worthy of exaltation.
Perhaps it is fanciful to suggest that
to understand this book we must re
member that it was written ten years
after "The French Revolution" — the
most astonishing prose epic in the lan
guage. In his study of the upheaval
in France Carlyle saw that anarchy
and ruin must result from such • an
upheaval unless there were a truly
strong and wise man to lead it. Oliver
Cromwell, who dominated the English
Revolution and was swayed by the
deepest religious principles (fanaticism,
131

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
his enemies would say), was a strong
man and worthy of being revered. If,
on the other hand, you turn to the
"Life of Schiller," written earlier, be
fore his passion for interpretation hur
ried Carlyle before it, you will discover
rather a conventional specimen of bi
ography in the first third of the Nine
teenth Century. His "Life of John
Sterling," however, is one of the sweet
est revelations of a fine, manly charac
ter which one friend ever made of an
other; although, viewed from the ideals
of Art, it has its excrescences and ex
cesses. The Italians have a proverb which
sums up the common opinion of au
thors toward translators: " Traduttore,
traditore." The play on the Italian
words cannot be reproduced in Eng
lish, but the meaning can be: "Trans
lator, traitor or betrayer." I feel that
in too many cases this motto would
132

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
apply also to biographers, and to no
one more conspicuously than to James
Anthony Froude. I once asked
Charles Eliot Norton, who knew both
men, how Carlyle came to designate
Froude as his biographer, and Mr.
Norton replied by quoting Landor's
sadly cynical epigram:
"The wisest of the wise
Listen to pretty lies,
And love to hear them told.
Doubt not that Solomon
Listen'd to many a one,
Some in his youth and more when he grew
old."
Froude, who was younger than Car
lyle by more than twenty years,
had been one of his earliest and
stanchest devotees, and as Carlyle
sank into old age Froude attended him
assiduously, and, it is not unkind to
infer, suggested that he be made the
great man's literary executor and bi
ographer. We can see how, under the
133

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
circumstances, Carlyle should be grati
fied to know that a disciple who gave
him back his own opinions should have
charge of this important service. But
see how tragic the results were !
Thomas Carlyle, in many respects,
filled for the English-speaking world
during fifty years of the Nineteenth
Century, a place similar to that filled
in the Eighteenth Century by Samuel
Johnson. Through the good fortune
of having James Boswell for his biog
rapher, Johnson lives as the most in
teresting, if not as the most beloved,
figure of his age; whereas Carlyle,
after the pubHcation of his life by
Froude, suffered a personal eclipse from
which he has not yet emerged. This
is not owing to the fact that the fashion
in. writing History has changed, that
Science has discredited Romanticism,
that liberal and even radical ideas
have swamped Carlyle's conservatism
134

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
— Johnson's Toryism also had gone
out of fashion before he died, but that
did not lessen the interest men took
in his personality: Carlyle's wounded
name with posterity was owing to
Froude's betrayal.
I do not imply that Froude inten
tionally traduced Carlyle, his natural
purpose being, of course, to magnify
his hero; but as a biographer he was
both false and inartistic. He was
false because he used the material
which he found in Carlyle's letters and
diaries to scourge persons whom he
himself hated; he was inartistic be
cause by putting the wrong emphasis
on Carlyle's conduct he gave the world
a wrong impression of the total man.
To pick out a temporary state of
mind, a fleeting irritation, a unique
rudeness, a whim or foible, harmless
and even amusing if described prop
erly, and to present these as if they
135

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
were habitual, the very bone and
sinew of the man's character, was
bad art. That kindest of critics and
sweetest-natured of friends, Horace
Furness, told me that he never wanted
to hear of Carlyle again after he read
in Froude's "Life" that he had allowed
his wife to scrub the bricks in the little
back yard of Number 5, Cheyne Row.
"Miserable creature!" said Mr. Fur
ness, "he ought to have gone down on
his knees and scrubbed them himself!"
Now, if it was necessary to record
that incident at all Froude might have
done it in such a way as to show its
proper relation with the rest of Car
lyle's life, ijistead of making it appear
an ungallant and almost brutal fact
which must spring from the man's
whole character. Few can be the
households in which there are not oc
currences which, if ripped out of their
proper perspective, would not expose
136

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
husbands and wives to very harsh and
totally unjustified inferences.
This is merely one example out of
hundreds in Froude's "Biography"
which illustrate the harm biographers
may do by improper emphasis, unless
each event is so framed that the reader
can judge it truly, as he would do if he
could have seen it himself. He either
sins wilfully or is incompetent. In
Froude's case we are forced to conclude
that he sinned deliberately, in order to
gratify his own spite or to push his
own opinions. How otherwise shall.
we explain the multitude of verbal
changes from Carlyle's manuscript to
Froude's printed version — changes in
some of which the neutral or kindly
epithets of the original became abusive
or malignant ? How otherwise shall we
explain that the slip of paper on which
Carlyle prohibited the publication of
one of the volumes of "Reminis-
137

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
cences" disappeared, and that Froude
discovered it only after the volume
was printed, and Carlyle's niece insis
tently demanded it ? I cite Froude as
the great warning to biographers. He
not only committed a crime against
the hero he wished to glorify, but I
fear that he so damaged Carlyle's repu
tation that it can be restored only when
some true man, equipped with honesty,
artistic sense, and adequate biograph
ical talent shall write a life of him.
How different the fortune of Mac
aulay, Carlyle's chief contemporary
master in the writing of History ! His
" Life, " by his nephew. Sir George Otto
Trevelyan, seems to me second only
to Boswell's "Johnson." Trevelyan
wrote on a different plan from Bos
well's, but he achieved what he in
tended not less remarkably than did
Boswell. In this work you have a
perfect interweaving of biography and
138

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
history, balance, discretion, a rare
skill in summarizing, ample quotation
from letters and journals, but not too
ample, and a sufficiently intimate por
trayal of Macaulay as public man, and
especially as son, brother, uncle, and
friend. The doctrinaires, who sup
posed thirty years ago that they had
killed Macaulay, are themselves dead,
but he lives on, and it seems quite un
likely that the English-speaking race
will soon if ever throw over into obliv
ion this spokesman of some of its
mightiest characteristics. As long as
Macaulay is read Trevelyan's "Life"
of him also will be read, and it will
serve as a pattern for countless future
biographers. Remember that one-half — I might
almost say four-fifths — of a biogra
phy depends on the biographer.
The charm of the "Life of Alice Free
man Palmer" springs from the fact
139

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
that her husband. Professor George H.
Palmer, wrote it. He saw her as a
beautiful ideal, and had the art and
imagination and glow to make us all
see her as he did. On the other hand,
Justin Winsor, in his biography of
Columbus, falls short, because he de
votes too much time to the low quali
ties and misdemeanors of Columbus.
Now, Columbus was created to discover
America, and not to be a pattern like
St. Francis of Assisi, or some of the
Pilgrim Fathers, of the highest Chris
tian virtues. In like fashion, it seems
to me, the Reverend A. V. G. Allen's
portrait of Phillips Brooks is out of
drawing, because he emphasizes too
much matters which interested Allen
as a Theologian more than they did
Brooks as an Evangelist whose mission
it was to speak at all times and at all
places, with wonderful persuasion, the
message of God. 140

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
I shall not attempt to discuss, even
briefly, the later biographies in Eng
lish. I have already mentioned Mor
ley's "Life of Gladstone" and Winston
Churchill's "Life" of his father. Lord
Randolph. The latter would be twice
as good if it were half as long, for
Churchill errs, as most Englishmen do,
in attaching an exaggerated importance
to partisan political details. After all.
Sir Stafford Northcote, Goschen, Lord
Hartington, and even Lord Salisbury
are not personages of heroic size or gi
gantic importance when viewed through
the perspective of thirty years, and
Mr. Churchill describes them so mi
nutely that I at least find it difficult
to trace in his description the trunk-
line of their policy.
Hallam Tennyson's "Life" of his
father would confirm those who hold
that the widow or son of a celebrity
ought never to be his biographer.
141

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
On the other hand, Francis Darwin
and Leonard Huxley both produced
satisfactory biographies of their fa
thers. I have not considered French,
Italian, and German biographical
works, partly because I am not fa
miliar with enough of them to draw
any general conclusions. A whole li
brary has been written about Napo
leon, but so far as I know nobody has
yet achieved a transcendent biography
of him. The same is true of Bismarck,
and the likelihood seems slight that he
will ever be put into a book to be read
throughout the world. For German
biographers are so absorbed in the
shoe-buckles and laundry bills of their
heroes — witness Diintzer's "Goethe"
and "Schiller" — that they are unable
to get inside of the man, or even to
stand upright and look at him eye to
142

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
eye. They have too much the posture
of lackeys and valets.
In French, Paul Sabatier's "Life of
St. Francis" illustrates how, through
sympathy, the right biographer can
almost persuade his readers that a
character who comes to them through
a golden mist of miracles is real. More
recently Valery-Radot has depicted
the great man of science, Louis Pasteur,
so nobly that he seems as worthy of
wearing a halo as did any medieval
saint. In one branch of biography
the French have excelled, and that is
in critical and analytical lives of public
men. Whoever reads the monographs
on Cavour and on Metternich, by
Charles de Mazade, will see excellent
specimens of this genre, which has
thriven too little among us because our
historical students were long intimi
dated by the German professors, who
143

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
sneered at any work in which foot-notes
and references did not outmeasure the
text. But this despotism by pedants
is, we may hope, at an end.
And so, after our long survey, we
bring the Art of Biography down to
the present, when multiplicity seems
to be its foremost trait. We under
stand that any man who is interesting
may be a proper subject for a biog-
grapher; king, dukes, ahd the upper
classes must now have more than their
title and position in order to attract
us. We recognize, also, that each per
son, like the sitter for a painter, re
quires to be drawn in the attitude and
atmosphere which will most fitly re
veal him. I regard sympathy as an
indispensable qualification in the biog
rapher, although a good many persons
still believe that devil's advocates are
more likely to tell the truth. The sym-
144

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
pathy which I mean, however, does not
degenerate into unrestrained eulogy,
but interprets the defects, blunders,
and even the sins of its subject, in their
true relations. The aim of the biog-
grapher should be Totality, which, if
achieved, coincides with Michael An
gelo's definition of Beauty: "II Piii
neir Uno" — The whole in one, or the
universal in the particular.
"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower;
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."
So I leave Biography on the thresh
old of what may be a Golden Age.
Its outlook was never brighter. Its
votaries will practise it with a con
stantly increasing skill. The demand
for veracity will not slacken. The
public, grown more discerning, will read
it with greater relish. And I think
that we may predict that the general
145

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
average of biographical writing will be
higher than it has been, though the
number of master biographers like that
of master portrait-painters can never
be large, hardly more than two or
three in a century.
The fact that the persons and events
the biographer depicts were real will
lend to them an additional attractive
ness. Given life, the first impulse of life —
the incessant, triumphant impulse —
is to manifest itself in individuals.
From the beginning there has never
been a moment, or the fraction of a
second, when the universe or the tiniest
part of it, became abstract. In the
world of matter not less than in the
organic world of animals and plants,
always and everywhere and forever —
individuals ! From atom to Sirius,
nothing but individuals ! Even in the
protean transmutation of one thing
146

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
into another, of life into death, and
death into life, individuality keeps
pace with each changing stage.
Since the process of individualiza
tion is from lower to higher, from sim
ple to complex, the acknowledged great
men in history, or the persons who
stand out from any mass, are endowed
with unusual qualities, or with com
mon qualities in an uncommon degree
— an endowment which gives them
more points of contact, more power,
more interest, more charm. These are
the men and women whom biography
perpetuates. The master creations of
fiction spring from the human brain;
the subjects of biography are the very
creations of God himself; the realities
of God must forever transcend the
fictions of man.

147

A SHORT LIST OF BOOKS
I have been asked to furnish a short list of the
books referred to in these Essays. The titles I have
set down are either those of the editions which I
myself have used or which the reader will probably
find the most convenient to procure. I make no
attempt to compile a complete bibliography.
W. R. T.
Abelard and Heloise, Love Letters of. (London : Dent,
1901. Temple Classics.)
Agricola, Life of. Tacitus, translated by Church
and Brodribb. (London: Macmillan, 1877.)
Apollonius of Tyana, Life of. By Philostratus; Eng
lish translation by F. C. Conybeare. (New
York: Macmillan, 191 2. 2 vols.)
Brooks, Phillips. Life and Letters. By A. V. G.
Allen. (New York: Dutton, 1901. 2 vols.)
Burke. By John Morley. (London and New York:
Macmillan, 1901.)
Byron, Letters and Journals of Lord; with Notices of
His Life. By Thomas Moore. (Paris: 1833.
2 vols.) 149

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
Byron, Works : Poetry. 7 vols. Letters and Jour
nals. 6 vols. (London: Murray; Scribner,
1898-1904. 13 vols.)
CcEsars, Lives of Twelve. By Suetonius; translated
by J. C. Rolfe. (New York: Putnam's, 1914.
Loeb Classical Library.)
Carlyle, Thomas. History of First Forty Years oj
Carlyle's Life. By J. A. Froude. (London:
Chapman and Hall; New York: Charles Scrib
ner's Sons, 1882. 2 vols.)
Carlyle, Thomas. History of Carlyle's Life in Lon
don. By J. A. Froude. (London: Chapman
and Hall; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1884. 2 vols.)
Cavour, Comte de. By Charles de Mazade. (Paris :
Pion, 1877.)
Cellini, Benvenuto, Life of. Translated by J. A.
Symonds. (London: Nimmo, 1883.) Also
translated by Anne Macdonnel. (London:
Dent, 1903.)
Charlemagne, Einhard's Life of. English transla
tion. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915.)
Churchill, Lord Randolph, Life of. By Winston
Churchill. (London: Macmillan, 1906. 2 vols.)
Clarendon, Edward Hyde, First Earl of. Characters
and Episodes of the Great Rebellion. Edited by
G. D. Boyle. (Oxford: 1889.)
Cobden, Richard, Life of. By John Morley. (Bos
ton: Roberts Bros., 1890.)
150

A SHORT LIST OF BOOKS
Columbus, Christopher. By Justin Winsor. (Bos
ton: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1901.)
Cromwell, Oliver. Letters and Speeches. By Thomas
Carlyle. (London: Chapman and Hall; New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1897. 4 vols.)
Cromwell, Oliver, Life of. By John Morley. (Lon
don: Macmillan; New York: Century Co.,
1902.)
Cyropadia. By Xenophon; English translation by
Walter Miller. (New York: Putnam's, 1914.
Loeb Classical Library.)
Darwin, Charles, Life and Letters of. Edited by his
son, Francis Darwin. (London: Murray; New
York: D. Appleton, 1888. 2 vols.)
David, Story of. I and II Samuel, passim.
Diderot. By John Morley. (London and New
York: Macmillan, 1 891. 2 vols.)
Frederick the Great, Life of. By Thomas Carlyle.
(London: Chapman and Hall; New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1897-98. 8 vols.)
The French Revolution. By Thomas Carlyle. (Lon
don: Chapman and Hall; New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1896. 3 vols.)
Froissart. Chronicles. Translated by Bourchier;
edited in I vol. by G. C. Macaulay. (London:
Macmillan, 1895. Everyman's Library. Lon
don: Dent, 1906.)
Gladstone, William Ewart, Life of. By John Morley.
(London and New York: Macmillan, 1903.
3 vols.) 151

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
Goethe, Life of. By H. Diintzer; translated by
T. W. Lyster. (London: Unwin; New York:
Macmillan, 1884.)
Huxley, Charles Henry, Life and Letters of. By his
son, Leonard Huxley. (London and New
York: Macmillan.)
Imitation of Christ. By Thomas a Kempis ( ?)
(Everyman's Library.)
J ef eries, R. Story of My Heart. (London : Long
mans, 1891.)
Johnson, Samuel. Lives of the English Poets. (Lon
don: Warne. Chandos Library.)
Johnson, Boswell's Life of. By T. Carlyle. In
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, vol. III.
(London: Chapman and Hall; New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons. 1899.)
Johnson, Boswell's Life of. Edited by G. Birkbeck
Hill. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887. 6 vols.')
Joseph, Story of. Genesis, Chaps. 37-48.
Kingsley, Charles, Letters and Memoirs of. By Mrs.
F. E. Kingsley. (London: 1877. Abridged in
I vol., 1901.)
Lincoln, Abraham. By Lord Charnwood. (Lon
don: Constable; New York: Holt, 191 8.)
Lincoln, Abraham. A History. By Nicolay and
Hay. (New York: Century Co., 1890. 10 vols.)
Louis IX. By Jean, Sire de Joinville. Edition De
Wailly. (Paris: Didot, 1874.) Also in Mem
oirs of the Crusades. Translated by Frank
152

A SHORT LIST OF BOOKS
Marzials. (London: Dent [1908]. Everyman's
Library.)
Macaulay, T. B. Complete works. (London: Long
mans; Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co. Fireside
Edition, 1910. 10 vok.)
Macaulay, Life and Letters of Lorti. By his nephew,
George Otto Trevelyan. (London: Longmans,
1876. Also New York: Harpers, 1909.)
Maimon, Solomon. Autobiography. Translated by
J. C. Murray. (Boston: Cupples & Hurd,
1888.)
Marcus Aurelius. English by G. H. Rendall. (Lon
don: Macmillan, 1901.)
Metternich. Un Chancelier d^ Ancien Regime. By
Charles de Mazade. (Paris: 1886.)
Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography. 1873. (Lon
don: Longmans; New York: Henry Holt, 1874.)
More, Life of Sir Thomas. By W. Roper. (Lon
don: 1822.)
Morley, John. Recollections. (London and New
York: Macmillan, 1917. 2 vols.)
Palmer, AUce Freeman, Life of. By G. H. Palmer.
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1908.)
Pascal, Blaise. Pens'ees, d'apres I'ed. de Brun-
schrigg. (London: Dent, Collection Gallia.)
Pasteur, Louis. Life of Pasteur. By R. Vallery-
Radot. (London: Nutt-Berry; New York:
Doubleday, Page & Co., 1902. 2 vols.)
Pitt, William, Life of. By Philip Henry Stanhope,
fifth Earl Stanhope. (London: 1879. 4 vols.)
153

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY
Plutarch's Lives. The translation called Dryden's,
corrected from the Greek and revised by A. H.
Clough. (Liverpool: Henry Young, 1883. 3
vols.)
Rousseau. By John Morley. (London : Macmillan,
1915. 2 vols.)
St. Augustine. Confessions. Translated by E. B.
Pusey. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1909.)
Also translated by W. Watts, 1 63 1. (London:
Heinemann, 191 2. 2 vols.)
St. Francis, The Little Flowers of. [Fioretti.] Trans
lated by T. W. Arnold. (London: Dent, 1898.
Temple Classics.)
St. Francis. Life of St. Francis of Assisi. By Paul
Sabatier. (London: Hodder and Stoughton;
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1894.)
Schiller, Friedrich, Life of. By Thomas Carlyle.
(London: Chapman and Hall; New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1899.)
Schiller, Life of. By H. Diintzer; English transla
tion by P. E. Pinkerton. (London: Macmillan,
1883.)
Scott, Sir Walter, Life of. By J. G. Lockhart.
(Edinburgh: Cadell, 1839. 9 vols.)
Socrates, Memorabilia of the Life of. By Xenophon.
(London: Dent, 1913. Everyman's Library.)
Sterling, John, Life of. By Thomas Carlyle. (Lon
don: Chapman and Hall; New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1897.) 154

A SHORT LIST OF BOOKS
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. A Memoir. By his son.
(London and New York: Macmillan, 1897.
2 vols.)
Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of Seventy Painters, Sculptors,
and Architects. Blashfield edition. (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1898. 4 vols.)
Villehardouin s Chronicle of the Fourth Crusade. In
Memoirs of the Crusades ; translated by Frank
Marzials. (London: Dent, [1908]. Everyman's
Library.)
Voltaire. By John Morley. (London: Macmillan,
19x5.)
Walpole, Robert. By John Morley. (London: Mac
millan, 1889. Twelve English Statesmen
Series.)
Walton, Izaak. Lives of Donne, Wotton, Hooker,
Herbert. (London: Dent, 1898. Temple Clas
sics. 2 vols.)
Wolsey, Life of Cardinal. By his Gentleman Usher,
George Cavendish. (London: Rivingtons,
1852.)

155

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