From The National Review.
BIOGRAPHY.

the few remarks which my experience has taught me will be neither original nor profound.

THE most amusing book in the language is "The Dictionary of National Biography in the dictionary form has Biography." If any one doubts what certain peculiarities of its own. The appears to me to be a self-evident dictionary-maker stands in awe of Dryproposition, he has only to buy the asdust. He must try to satisfy the work and to dip into it at odd moments. genealogist and the bibliographer. He He must be hard to please if he is not must, therefore, give a number of deinterested in a collection of all that is tails which often have little bearing known about our countrymen of all upon the life of his hero. It is imposages, including the dim personages sible to say what minute fact may not who "flourished" in an uncertain cen- have some incidental interest for the tury and the last M or N whose obit-historian, and a good deal of dry inforuary notice is in last year's newspapers.mation must be recorded which the Many volumes full of interesting anec- reader for amusement must be trusted dotes, every word of which is true, to skip. Still more has the dictionarymust surely fascinate every intelligent reader. As I had the fortune to be closely connected with this undertaking for some years, and was bound therefore to read every article, I ought to speak with some authority, as I can now speak with impartiality. An excellent friend of mine, who inferred that I must be overflowing with the knowledge so imbibed, asked me the other day whether I had not become a profound psychologist. Possibly I ought to have acquired what is called "a knowledge of the human heart." But, in the first place, I find that I forget all about the A's before I have got well into the C's. In the next place, the chief part of an editor's duties consists in acting as Dryasdust. Questious as to whether a date is given in the old style or the new, or as to whether two different titles refer to the same book or to two different books, or to two different modifications of the same book, cannot be said to throw much light upon problems of psychology. And, finally, to say nothing else, one has to study not life at first hand, but what has been said about lives by biographers, which is a very different thing. A study of biographies by the dozen, though it often leaves one pretty much in the dark as to the people biographized, ought perhaps to give one some views as to the art of biography. It is difficult, indeed, to say much that is true and that is not perfectly obvious about any art whatever, and I feel that

The

maker to trust to the reader to supply
the flesh and blood to his dry bones.
He must restrain his rhetoric and
sentiment and philosophical reflection
within the narrowest bounds. Our
critics-it is the only fault I can find
with them-sometimes do us too much
honor by comparing us with literature
of a more ambitious class. They take
the show-lives-the Shakespeare or
William the Conqueror - and ask
whether they have been adequately
written, and whether the writers show
a sound judgment in their literary or
historical theories. Now, we cannot
afford to expatiate about Shakespeare;
we have to make room for the less con-
spicuous people, about whom it is hard
to get information elsewhere.
real test of the value of the book is in
the adequacy of these timid and third-
rate lives. Nor, again, will a reader of
sense look to a dictionary to tell him (if
he wants to be told) what he ought to
think of Shakespeare's plays, or of
William's position in the world's his-
tory. There are plenty of philosophers
who will gladly supply him with ideas
on those subjects. The dictionary-
maker can at most give a brief indi-
cation of the opinions held by good
authorities and a reference to the books
where they are discussed; and, pos-
sibly, may intimate summarily his own.
conclusions. But to discuss or ex-
pound those conclusions at length is
impossible, and the critic, if he chooses
to take the article as a peg on which to c

hang his own theories, must not com- | content to be silent when there is plain if it pretends to be no more than nothing to be said. If facts are wanta peg. ing, he fills up the gap with might

I have given these hints because have-beens. He tells us that when they may indicate the true nature of the Robinson was born Brown was on his problem to be solved. The dictionary-death-bed and Jones prime minister, maker writes under the strictest lim- and speculates upon what would have itations. But art, as is often observed, happened if they had all been contemmay show itself best under such lim- poraries. When the poor dictionaryitations. The writer of a sonnet, if maker has to say briefly, is, "John the comparison be not too ambitious, Smith was educated at the grammarknows that his success is due to the school of his native town" the writer difficulties which he has surmounted. of a graphic biography talks of the His gems are imperishable if he has Renaissance and the early system of fitted his thought precisely to the pre-scholastic training, and Dr. Busby and scribed form. Now, the writer of an corporal punishment, and the influence ideal dictionary life would achieve a of classical culture upon the human somewhat similar task. He would mind in general as well as upon Smith manage to say everything while appar- in particular. The dictionary-maker ently saying nothing; to give all the must trust that his reader will see all facts demanded from him; to give this between the lines; take the philosnothing but the facts; and yet to make ophy and the pathos for granted, and the facts tell their own story. If he is make his own picture of the small not allowed to comment or to criticise, Shakespeare creeping like a snail to the he may put the narrative so that the Stratford school, instead of repeating comment or criticism is tacitly insinu- the well-known paragraph which beated into the mind of his reader. By gins, "The imagination loves to dwell." skilful arrangement of his story by When I have had to read some of condensation of the less important these exuberant biographies I have parts, by laying due stress on the most wished that I could have had the writer essential, he should set the little drama under my charge for a time. Firmly, of a human life in the right point of if benevolently, I would have drilled view and reveal its most important him; cut out all his fine things, conaspects. A smart journalist knows densed his sentiment by a little cold how to beat out a single remark into a water, and squeezed his half-dozen column of epigrams and illustrations. pages into half a column. I have tried The dictionary-maker should aim at the the experiment, and it should be rereverse process, he should coax the corded, for the credit of human nature, column of smoke back into the original that a writer was once good enough to vase; he should give the very pith and express a gratitude for my surgery. essence of the case, and, like the skilful Others mildly remonstrated; yet surely, advocate, appear to be simply relating if I did not use the knife very clumsily, a plain narrative, when he is really the discipline was a good one. dictating the verdict. "Thou hast con- these days, when we have decided, as vinced me," as Rasselas says, that no- it seems, that nothing is to be forbody can write such an article. That gotten, two things are rapidly becomis perfectly true; but to produce such ing essential - some literary condensing an article may be the dream of the machine, and a system of indexing. writer, however conscious he may be Our knowledge, that is, requires to that ideals are rarely attainable in this be concentrated and to be arranged. world. When I have been in the library of the I say this from the dictionary-maker's British Museum I have been struck point of view; but it applies to biogra-with a not wholly pleasing awe: I phers in general, and now more than went one day to the manuscript-room,

ever.

In

The modern biographer is not and there was invited to regale myself.

with three thick volumes of closely and then try to smelt it and cast it into written letters by the London agent of its natural mould. His first operation certain foreign booksellers, filled, in an is, of course, to take the lives already illegible hand, with the smallest lit- written, and to boil them down into erary gossip of the days of George II. the necessary limits. Many lives must I extracted from it, after much pains, contain as much history as biography, the name of the university at which and of the historical aspects I do not Des Maiseaux had taken his degree, propose to speak. The life with which for which I hope my readers will be I am concerned is the record of what thankful. I went to the reading-room, happened to a single human being beand discovered there a college exercise tween his birth and his death; and the printed in the seventeenth century at purpose of the narrator is to show what Leydon, which enabled me to reveal to he was and how he came to be what an inquisitive world the name of Ber- he was. It is only in a few cases that nard Mandeville's father. It is bewil- these questions can be said to have dering to think that a lad cannot print been adequately treated. The most a declamation in Holland without the really interesting problem that of the thing being preserved for the benefit of development of the human character – Englishmen two centuries later. The is generally the most inscrutable. If, mass of matter preserved on the as has been frequently said, any man shelves of that invaluable Museum is even the most commonplace, could be the externalized memory of the race. adequately explained; if we could be There is nothing too petty or contempt- told with what qualities he started, and ible to be preserved. When one thinks what influences really moulded and of all the records preserved up and developed them, we should have a down Europe in the archives of various book of unsurpassable interest. But it States, of all the materials in private is rare to find any approach to such an hands, of the infinitesimal portion which account. Few facts are preserved till any reader could get through in a life- a man has become well known, and by time, and then of the enormously ac- that time his character is generally celerated rate at which information is formed. Nothing is more striking to now being compiled and amassed in the biographer than the rapidity with safe repositories, one stands agliast. If which all possibility of satisfactory pora fire should take place at the Record traiture vanishes. Nobody, as Johnson Office or the British Museum I would somewhere says, could write a satisfacgive all the strength I possess to work-tory life of a man who had not lived ing the engines. But if fire were a dis- iu habits of intimacy with him. Now, creet element, which could be trusted it is rare for a man to preserve the to burn only the rubbish, I could find intimates of his early years; school it in my heart to applaud a conflagra- friendships are transitory, and schooltion. boys are not generally keen psychologists. All they can generally remember is the best score made in a cricketmatch or the prize at an examination. They generally see nothing of their schoolfellow's real life, and they are divided between the wish to show that they recognized genius early, and the pleasure of supporting the paradox that the genius was originally stupid. If the father or mother or schoolmaster survive, the schoolmaster has an eye to the merits of his school; the father probably thought more of the schoolbills than of the boy's work; and the

This is a digression; but it gives the reflection which is constantly before the dictionary-maker. He is a toiler among those gigantic piles of "shot rubbish" of which Carlyle complained so bitterly when he too was a slave of Dryasdust. He is trying to bring into some sort of order, alphabetical at least, the chaos of materials which is already so vast and so rapidly accumulating. To write a life is to collect the particular heap of rubbish in which his material is contained, to sift the relevant from the superincumbent mass,

ti

mother was a mother. The friends | when they are of the scantiest. They
who survive are generally those who stimulate the imagination to realize one
have been attracted in later years; and of the hardest of all truths to accept-
even if they are keen of penetration that the existence of a "Hamlet" now
and of power of telling what they have proves that there must actually have
perceived both rare qualities and fre- once been a William Shakespeare.
quently disjoined they only tell us of The lives written in that period, in-
the finished product. The few biog- deed, seem to leave the case almost
raphies which give a really instructive doubtful. They are so vague, perfunc-
account of mental and moral growth tory, and unsubstantial, that we are
are autobiographies. After making half inclined to regard the heroes as
obvious allowances, they are always mere phantoms, vague X's and Y's
instructive, and they generally dwell
with natural fondness upon the early
years, in which the critical process was
undergone. Without such a narrative
or letters or diaries which are in some
-respects a better, because a more un-
conscious and less modified, autobiog-
raphy, the life of a famous man is
often an insoluble problem even at his
death. I could mention men whom I
have known, who were known to very
wide circles, and who were survived by
many contemporaries, whose early his-
tory, except so far as the bare external
facts are concerned, must remain purely
conjectural, simply because no compe-
tent witness has survived them. Those
who were in a position to know were
unobservant, or stupid, or dull, or for-
getful.

We can now generally ascertain - it is a rather melancholy reflection-all the external facts; but whatever cannot be inferred from them vanishes "like the smoke of the guns on a windswept hill!" School registers and the like will supply us with an ample framework of dates; but the history of the mind and character evaporates, and is vaguely supplied by conjecture. Do we even remember our own history, or did we even know at the time what was really happening to us? Some people with powerful memories seem to preserve a detailed map of the past; but in my own case, which is, I suspect, the commonest, I should be reduced to mere guessing as to my motives and the influences which affected me almost as much as though I were writing of a stranger. And yet, with all such necessary imperfections, biographies have a fascination, even

who never trod the solid earth. The actors upon the great stage of politics here, of course, come down to us with sufficient vividness. A man who has cut off other men's heads, or had his own cut off, has impressed his reality upon the world; but the mere author, philosopher, or poet, has vanished, like Aubrey's famous spirit, leaving nothing behind but a "twang" and a sweet, or perhaps not sweet, savor. The biographers at most were content to amplify the conventional epitaph; or at times, like the excellent Izaak Walton, they wrote most charming little idylls, beautiful to read, but curiously empty of facts, and tinged with a rosecolor calculated to rouse suspicions. For some biographies the main authority is a funeral sermon; and the typical funeral sermon is one which an eloquent divine constructed out of an elaborate parallel between the characters of King David and George II. If we had only known of George the points in which he resembled the Hebrew monarch, our information would obviously have been defective. writer to whom all readers of seventeenth-century biography often Owe their fullest knowledge is Anthony à Wood, one of the most thorough and satisfactory of antiquaries. His inestimable collection is charming not only from its good workmanship within its own limits, but also for the delightful growls of disgust extracted from the old High Church don at every mention of a Nonconformist or a Whig- especially if the wretch claims to possess any virtues. But Wood can only give, and only professes to give, data for lives, not the finished product. As

A

time goes on we get the biography | and, with obvious limitations, investiwhich serves as a preface to collective gating it with remarkable insight. Of works. The author is haunted by the the immortal Boswell, it is happily modest conviction that his readers are needless to speak. Since his book, no anxious to get at the author's own writ-writer has been at a loss for a model; ings, and is content with pronouncing and many most delightful books are its a graceful éloge, without defiling his descendants, though none has eclipsed elegant phrases by the earthly material its ancestor. Boswell founded biogof facts. Toland wrote a life of Mil- raphy in England as much as Gibbon ton, when a dozen people were extant founded history and Adam Smith politwho could have described for him the ical economy. He produces that effect domestic life of his hero. He felt, of which Carlyle often made such however, that to go into such details powerful use, the sudden thrill which would compromise his dignity, and comes to us when we find ourselves leave no room for his judicious obser- in direct communication with human vations upon epic poetry. Of Toland feeling in the arid wastes of convenhimself we are told by a biographer tional history; when we perceive that that he was forced to leave the court at a real voice is speaking out of "the Berlin "by an incident too ludicrous to dark backward and abysm" of the past, mention." We vainly feel that we and a little island of light, with moving would give more for that incident than and feeling figures, still standing out for all the other facts mentioned. This amidst the gathering shades of oblivdignified style survived till the end of ion. Perhaps there are no books in the last century, and we have a grudge which the imagination is so often stimagainst Dugald Stewart, otherwise an ulated in that way as in Carlyle's own excellent person, for writing a life of "Cromwell" and Spedding's "Bacon." Adam Smith in the spirit of a continu- The "Bacon" is to me a singularly ous rebuff to impertinent curiosity. attractive book, to which, indeed, the The main purpose of such biographies only objection is that it is not properly seems to be to prevent posterity from a book, but a collection of documents. knowing anything about a man which It is therefore the mass of raw material they could not discover from other from which I hope that a book may sources. There is a biography famous some day be constructed. Such a book for not giving a single date, and an might be a masterpiece of applied psyautobiography in which the hero apol-chology. It would give the portrait of ogizes for once using the word "I." a man of marvellous and most versatile The biographer of modern times may intellect, full of the noblest ambitions be often indiscreet in his revelations; and the most extensive sympathies, but so far as the interest of the book combined with all the weaknesses goes the opposite pole is certainly the which we are accustomed to class as most repulsive. We want the man in "human nature." Spedding's herohis ordinary dress, if not stripped worship led him to apologize for all naked; and these dignified persons Bacon's errors; and, though the very will only show him in a full-bottomed ingenuity of the pretexts is characterwig and a professor's robes. Johnson istic both of the hero and his biogchanged all this as author and subject rapher, we are sensible that a more of biography. disengaged attitude would have enabled In the "Lives of the Poets," we Spedding to produce a more genuine have at least a terse record of the portrait. He has provoked later writessential facts seen through a medium ers to air their virtuous indignation a of shrewd masculine observation. The little too freely. We want the writer writer is really interested in life, not capable of developing the character in simply recording dates or taking a text the Shakespearian spirit; showing the for exhibiting his own skill in pero-facts with absolute impartiality, not rating. He is investigating character, displaying his moral sense, if that be