For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a

of ayalances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co.

Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents.

From The Contemporary Review.
THE ETHICS OF BIOGRAPHY.

adorned with garlands of miracles, but which hold every one a living soul of humanity, a human life commending itself to the admiration, the instruction, the following of men.

THE art of biography is one of the oldest in the world. if not the first, at least a very early form of literary composition. If before Homer and Moses there burst These are perhaps rather too magnififorth into lyrical lament the overburdened cent examples to be brought down to the soul of the early homicide who "slew a experiences of an age which scarcely perman to his wounding and a young man to mits a man to be cold in his grave before his hurt," making, before law began, the it turns forth from his old drawers and discovery that the criminal is always the wardrobes such relics of his living permost miserable of all the sons of Adamsonality as he may have left there, and his is, perhaps, the only human utter-displays his vacant clothes, with any twist ance which has preceded story-telling: that attitude or habit may have lent to and primitive story-telling is always a them, as characteristic of his soul. And kind of biography. The ancient history yet as the rules that Titian worked by of the Old Testament is entirely of this must still direct the modern art of por. description. It concerns itself less even traiture, even though descended into the with law-giving, though the first theory of hands of Dick Tinto- and our object is a constitution is involved in it, than with not to gather specimens from present the records of the life of one man after performance, but rather to elucidate the another Moses, Joshua, David, the laws by which the workmen in this art of leading spirits of their generations. The moral portrait-painting ought to be guided art of the minstrel takes a somewhat - it is scarcely possible to go too high for different development, and selects the our examples. The saints and heroes, dramatic incidents which count most in a however, if we believe what is now told us man's career, but still follows Ulysses on every side, were neither heroic nor through all his wandering course, and saintly to their valets, and it might have leads the reader back through intervening been, for anything we can tell, quite poscenturies to the footprints of an individ-sible to deprive us of every noble name ual man across an undeveloped world. It is the same in the sacred books of all religions, which are secondarily the store house of thought, of moral injunction and teaching, but primarily the records of the life of Brahma, Buddha, Mahomet. And of all religions, that which to us is the one entirely divine, the greatest and purest inspiration of heaven, what does our gospel mean but the biography of Christ, the most perfect of lives and portraitures, so transcending all others that either the fishermen of Galilee must have been men of a divine genius, before which neither Plato nor Shakespeare could lift their heads, or He whom in their simplicity they knew, such a man as never man before or after was. These are all biographical | works upon which the faiths of the world are founded. And so are those legends of the saints in all ages, to which the affectionate, imagination of the simple have lent a thousand embellishing touches beyond the simplicity of nature, and

that now gives lustre to humanity, and to
leave the past as naked of all veneration
or respect as is the present. That fine
St. George, who has given an emblem of
spotless valor and conquest over the im-
pure image of fleshly lust and cruelty to
two great nations he who tilts against
his dragon with such concentrated, grave
enthusiasm in that little chapel on the
Venice Canal, which Mr. Ruskin has
made one of the shrines to which we all
go on pilgrimages turns out, they say,
to have been an army contractor, furnish-
ing the shoddy of his time to the commis-
sariat; and a great deal the better we all
are for that exquisite discovery. And
St. Francis was a dirty, little, half-witted
fanatic, and Oliver Cromwell a vulgar im-
postor with a big wart, and Luther a fat
priest, who wanted to marry.
How many
more could we add to the list? till at the
end nobody would be left towards whom
we could look with any sentiment more
reverent than that which we feel for our

greengrocer. That this is not the true | any case to biography. The sentiment of

the death-chamber is one thing, the judg ment of history another. When we speak of the dead we mean our own contemporaries, those who have gone along with us through the conflicts, and probably competed with us in the rivalries, of life. The personages of previous generations are not in this sense the dead at all. They have passed through that period of softened regard, and are now beyond all such temporary courtesies, permanent fig ures upon the clear horizon of the past. It is one of the mysterious qualities of human nature that, though we all share the natural awe of that extraordinary and unfathomed wonder of death to which we are in our turn universally subject, yet an instinctive appreciation of the effects of

sentiment of humanity, nor in accord with any law of natural right and wrong, must be evident to the most cursory observer, and it is worth while, perhaps, to make an attempt to discover what are the tenets on this subject which ought to guide the artist, and which commend themselves to the impartial sense of mankind in general. Though there is a great deal of unconfessed cynicism in the common mind as respects matters within its practical range and immediate vicinity, there is something underlying this of a nobler strain, which does not permit even the man who doubts his neighbor's motives, and thinks the worst of his actions, to refuse a higher justice to those who stand apart on the vantage-ground of age or distance. Man is more just, more char-it as temporary is equally universal. A itable than men; and an appeal from the individual to the general is a privilege which we all seek instinctively, and in which, in the majority of cases, our instinct is justified.

1

man who has been dead twenty days is enveloped in a mystery and solemnity which the most heartless will not disturb. We speak of him with subdued voice, and recognize his right to the utmost stretch of tenderness of which charity is capable, and say nothing of him if not good. But he who has been dead twenty years, has, as it were, emerged from death altogether.

In this investigation we are met at once by a rule universally respected and very generally acquiesced in the first and broadest expression of natural feeling towards our contemporaries who are He has been, and to our senses is, no dead, De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Nothing can be more entirely justified by the instincts of human nature than this. In the hush of the death-chamber, by the edge of the grave, there is even a sort of benevolent fiction which comes naturally to our lips and to our thoughts, so that not only do we say nothing that is not good of the dead, but we go further, and during that moment in which judgment is suspended, do actually take the most charitable view of him, and find explanations for what is doubtful in his conduct, which would not satisfy us either before or after. Thus the French custom of a speech over a man's grave becomes necessarily, instinctively, an éloge. That it should be anything else would outrage every feeling of humanity. If we cannot praise we are silent, by a law of nature more strong than any written law, and shrink as from a blow if any unnaturalness of human kind. Biography would in voice is raised in disapproval. This, how ever, is not a rule which can be applied in

longer; but the mystery and awe have departed, and he is restored to the cheerful atmosphere of common day, though of a day that is past. It is probable that we know him better than in his lifetime, when he brushed shoulders with us, and we found him now in one mood, now another, but could not, so near were we, ever get him in perspective, or divine what he was thinking about, even while he walked with us by the common way. We saw the best of him, or we saw the worst of him, but we never saw all of him. degrees, however, he emerges out of that close vicinity and neighborhood, and rises greater, smaller, as it may be, but at last complete in the perfection of an atmosphere which no new events can disturb. To say nothing, if not what is good, of a man in this monumental position, would be a foolishness beyond even the foolish

By

that case become a senseless series of éloges, in which all character and individ

uality would be lost; for praise is the dullest of all expressions of feeling, just as a round of unbroken happiness is dull, and there is little or nothing to say about those who do well all their lives and neither offend nor suffer. Thus it is at once false in art and in nature to apply this proverb beyond the immediate period of the conclusion, when all hearts are soft, and every man who is not a monster receives from his race a natural tribute of sympathy at least, if not of regret.

are important to his affectionate recollection, he crowds the annals with detail and explanation, or accumulates every scrap of writing which fell from that pen, and every word, however trifling, which dropped from those lips, in fond unnecessary fulness, though skimming lightly over every dubious point, and leaving us without guidance or enlightenment where elucidation is most required. And while we regret we can scarcely censure such a principle; it is not the part of a son to set forth his father's faults, still less that of a wife to unfold the imperfections which, perhaps, she is all the more jealous of revealing because fully conscious of them, and perhaps, more happy, has never discovered. It is not from such witnesses that we can expect the uncolored chronicle of absolute truth.

That it continues, however, largely to influence the minds of those to whom it falls to write the records of men's lives, is due to various very simple causes. When this is done by a wife or a child, natural affection and family pride unite to make such a result almost inevitable. They know more about their subject, and they know less, than any stranger. It is a Something of the same kind must be rare gift, indeed, to be able to fathom the said, though with at once less excuse characters of those most dear to us, and and a better reason, for the disciple-biogwe doubt much whether it is a very desir-rapher whose enthusiasm for his subject able one. They are to us not men and is of a different kind, yet for whom we women in the first place, but father and feel a sympathy almost more strong than mother, husband or brother, a portion that with which we regard the family of ourselves. To judge their actions at exposition of a great name. He whom any crisis of their lives is as difficult as the character and work of another so to judge our own, and disturbed by the captivates, that he is ready to be his same perception of all the trifling motives champion and defender in all the conthat come in to interfere with the influ- flicts that may rise around him, and defy ence of the greater, which confuses us in the world on behalf of his hero, conciliour own case; and to judge unfavorably ates our regard for himself in affording would be an act of natural impiety which us proof of so generous a devotion, and would outrage the reader as well as the for his subject by making it apparent reverence due to the closest ties of hu- that one man at least cordially believes manity. Impartiality is not to be looked in him. The disciple's defence is usufor, scarcely to be desired, in such a case; ally even warmer than the son's; for he and it would be a greater harm to man- is better aware what are the objections, kind if a son, much less a wife or daugh- and knows that he cannot be permitted ter, were capable of setting forth the to ignore them, and with the instinct of darker shades in the character of the adoration establishes his strongest bas. father, than the proportionate gain of a tions where the natural defences are complete and well-balanced picture could most weak. He who formulated hero be to the world. Such is by far the worship as one of the creeds, adopted larger class of biographies; they are writ- this system to its fullest extent, and never ten in the shadow of the great event, is more hot and fiery for his gruesome which has separated from the writer the hero, than at points upon which other writman from whom, perhaps, he derives ers, less thorough, would give up Fredconsequence, the most notable person of erick. The enthusiast-biographer gives the family, the most beloved friend. He nothing up. If he makes a demigod of does not attempt to criticise or judge, he his subject when right, he deifies him. records; and as all things small and great | altogether when wrong, and forces his