Lives of Great Men

SPEAKING at the London Institution the other day, on the Ethics of Biography, Mr. Edmund Gosse — himself a biographer — discharged him of several daring propositions. First of all, he blamed the modern biographer for showing overmuch consideration for the family of the Great Man, and not enough for the public curious as to his life and personality. ‘Certain fashionable biographies of the present day deserve no other comment than the words, “A lie,” printed in bold letters across the title-page.’ For the writer, instead of searching for truth, has striven only to show us his subject ‘in a tight frock-coat, with a glass of water in his hand, and one elbow on a desk, in the act of preparing to say, “Ladies and Gentlemen.”’

This is clever journalism on Mr. Gosse’s part, but, one may respectfully inquire, is it just? We do not defend the ‘official’ biography: the kind of work that rivals the tombstone epitaph in fatuous, monumental ineptitude. To know such books is to yawn; it is, in spite of Mr. Gosse, a question whether they are truly ‘fashionable.’ But are not their authors preferable, at least, to those other biographers who rake the coulisses and gutters of the centuries, and write books that would be frankly prurient but for touches of insincere prudery ? — books on the ‘affairs’ of great musicians and painters and poets. Without deciding, however, on the relative blackness of these extremes of biographical vice, let us praise that not rare type of chronicler who finds it possible aptly to combine candor and good taste, maintaining, on occasion, a golden silence, or want of particularity, as to his hero’s goings-on. Such a biographer seems to us a much pleasanter fellow than he who, following Mr. Gosse’s formula, ‘drags the coy, retreating subject into the light of day.’ It is often the knowing just when to be realist, just when to ‘indicate,’as the painters say, that distinguishes from the incompetent biographer the historian whose fame cannot be hid. A matter of emphasis, as the dramatic critics like to remind us. We don’t want our biographers to choose Mrs. Grundy for their ideal Gentle Reader; yet Mrs. Grundy herself is surely no worse a type than the reader who insists upon having it all blurted out in black and white. Biography, like every kind of writing, is a fine art, and as such depends in part upon reserve.

These matters have, as it happens, more than a passing significance. For more than a handful of yester-years poets and romancers bid fair to hold their reputations rather as writers of friendly correspondence and memoirs than as the productive men of letters they professed to be. Dr. Johnson, as we were reminded at his recent bicentenary, is better known to-day as the subject of a biography by one Boswell than as the author of London and the Lives of the Poets. Stevenson and Lamb are almost as much tasted in their epistles as in more studied compositions. FitzGerald’s correspondence is placed on the level of his Rubáiyát. The ultras of Paris sneer at Chateaubriand’s novels and Genius of Christianity, but find his Memoirs ‘colossal.’ Readers everywhere, whatever their education and whatever their language, delight in every manner of reminiscences and confessions, — even when they’re not brand new. Nor is this necessarily one more evidence of our literary falling-off. There is at hand a far more cheerful explanation. It is because memoirs escape all the literary conventions, if one may believe Anatole France: in them, on ne doit rien à la mode — on ne cherche rien que la vérité humaine. While only a few circles are deeply interested in ‘art,’ all the world — not excepting most artists — is interested in human nature. The ‘Life’ has still its lure in an age grown deaf to verse. The ‘flesh and blood reality of Cellini’ is not staled either by time’s passage or by the fact that contemporary readers know little of the Renaissance. A compulsive quality in the best writings of this category appeals to all men alike: to fops and frumps, to Puritans and Lotharios. Long live the ‘Life’!