Pocket Biographies
[Appleton, $2.00 a volume]
THE Five-Foot Shelf set the pace. If a five-foot rule is measure enough for all the great have written, another five most certainly is room for all they were. This is the scale of the Appleton biographies — twelve to the foot — on a running shelf, and, after all, against the background of a scant twenty-five hundred years of history, this is not an inadequate measure. One slim volume is a fairer gauge of the value of any, or almost any, human life than the two fat ones to which our fathers have accustomed us.
And if it is a fair measure of biography, a single small volume is surely a rare test of biographers. Out must go all inessentials, and, if the biographer is wise, out should go, too, the thousand et ceteras which might be told of other men. All that remains should belong to the hero alone in the whole world.
If you would know how to write a life in thirty thousand words or so, pick up André Maurois’s Voltaire, the bellwether of the Appleton flock. Dates, save birth and death, are little to a book like this, and circumstance nothing unless it shaped the hero, or else the hero used it to attain his ends. On the other hand, ideas are everything: their development is the drama of the hero ’s life.
Of course, if M. de Voltaire had not lived for the world, he would in charity have lived for M. Maurois. Characters foreordained for the art of this Frenchman with delicately poised mind, cynical but straightvisioned, lucid, precise, and logical, are none too common. Of Shelley he could only appreciate the aberrations, and even of Disraeli he hardly apprehended the sinuous profundities, but Voltaire is his by right of birth and inspiration. As in all his short biographies, Maurois has the genius of attempting an essay rather than a Life, an impression rather than an analysis. If you want to know Voltaire, and two-score volumes are too many for you, read Candide, then read Maurois.
If I have singled out Maurois’s Voltaire, I would not by inference asperse the other volumes of a useful series. John Buchan’s Cæsar, the story of ‘the noblest man that ever lived in the tide of times,’ is hero worship where worship is most due. Another volume of which this reviewer would gladly say more than a perfunctory word is Wilfred Knox’s St. Paul. Turn the pages, Reader, of this honest and scholarly little book, and ask yourself whether explanation can avail in the presence of a palpable miracle. Follow the story of this crossgrained and most irritating man, who was wont to quarrel with his brethren and to bludgeon opposition with contempt, who founded a few mushroom congregations in Asia Minor, but who, because he had Faith, founded for the ages the greatest institution the mind of man has conceived.
James Maxton’s life of Lenin has the defects of the enthusiast for a cause of which most of us are skeptical, And Sir Laurence Binyon, who writes of Eastern art as no other Westerner can write, is unfortunate, it seems to me, in attempting the alien task of the biography of Akbar the Conqueror, a figure more suited to legend than to history. All the biographers in this useful series lend distinguished names to an enterprise to which the Atlantic most heartily wishes success. The form, especially the bindings of the books, is admirable. I would only suggest that a list of important dates would in every instance make an invaluable addition to I the prefatory matter, and, if a commercial suggestion is admissible, I would ask the publisher whether such little volumes cannot be more neatly adapted to purses yet more slender.
ELLERY SEDGWICK