LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. OF BIOGRAPHY. ONE morning last month the postman brought me a copy of what I can hardly yet be wrong in calling the latest contribution to our periodical press. The Scots Observer is its name, and a very good name, too, for the Scots have always been famous for keeping their eyes open since the days of Blind Harry. It seems to have started on a good road, in tone and temper aiming at a judicious mean between the too steadily serious and mere flippancy. It seems bent, in short, on doing what in it lies to promote that ideal age for which the poet of the Grande Chartreuse longed, and has perhaps now found Which without hardness will be sage, But what particularly interested me in the number was an article headed "On Certain Modern Biographies"; and this I found interesting not only for the gaiety and sageness of its remarks, but also because it came at a moment when I had it in my mind to spoil a few leaves of my Note-book on the same subject, and was doubting how to set about it. On me thus "waiting for the spark from heaven to fall" descended the Scots Observer ! Like Mr. Snawley, I feel that there has been a Providence in it. My Scottish friend seems to have observed with his angriest eye those theatrical biographies or autobiographies (for one knows not precisely which to call them) of which these last seasons have given us so plentiful a crop. They are silly, tiresome things enough, to be sure; but the worst offence does not come, I think, from them. In the first place, advertisement is the prime business of a player (for that matter it seems pretty well the prime business of everybody in these days!), one of the most important items of his stock-in-trade; and no one expects advertisements to be very valuable contributions to literature: not every advertiser can rise to such heights of inspiration as his who decorated the walls of an American cemetery with this great moral truth, "We must all die, but Brown's Hair-dye is the best"; or of our own artist in soap who conceived the notion of the pretty girl washing herself ashore from a wreck with a piece of his manufacture. Next we must remember that, after all, we have only ourselves to thank for this rather overwhelming descent of the player from his native boards; we have been so active in praising him for qualities outside the sphere of his own particular excellences, that we cannot now in reason reproach him for imagining that his fireside concerns are as important to us as his skill in the practice of his admired profession. And lastly, he is paying us back in our own coin, for the irruption of the amateur into his hereditary province has surely warranted some reprisals. No: the real offence seems to me to come not from Drury Lane but from Grub Street itself- or rather, as I suppose we must say now, from Paternoster Row, for Grub Street is down, like many another ancient haunt. 66 but Biography", wrote Johnson just one hundred and thirty years ago, “is, of the various kinds of narrative writing that which is most eagerly read and most easily applied to the purposes of life." The sage would hardly need to reconsider himself were he preparing a new edition of the Idler for the modern press. Biography (which of course includes autobiography) has always been popular, from the days when the Egyptian chroniclers published (by command) bridges and obelisks in honour of their great men, and never seemingly has it been more popular than now. Men have always been interested in their neighbours' lives, if not always in their own; and even if a man should be slightly bored with the circumstances of his own existence, he will never be bored with talking of them,-and what more natural, for who is not ready to transfer his own burden to his friend's back? Another cause of its popularity (in one at least of the two great hemispheres of the world of Letters) is undoubtedly this, that, while of all forms of narrative it is perhaps the most difficult to excel in, it offers beyond all comparison the amplest opportunities for that kind of writing which has been declared on high authority to make the hardest kind of reading. Small wonder, then, if in an age when everybody writes and everybody affects to read, the biographer should mightily flourish in the land. What is biography! Not jesting, but in all seriousness, the world will not wait for an answer, but shouting a book! seizes on the portly volumes in which the sorrowing Gyas has tracked the even footsteps of his friend Cloanthus from the cradle to the grave, with letters, a portrait, facsimiles of C.'s handwriting at various stages of his blameless career, and an appendix containing testimonials (to G.'s skill as well as to C.'s virtue) from a distinguished statesman, a pretty actress, or the last fashionable creed-maker-and gulps the sawdust down. And truly it may be said that this sort of narrative writing is most easily applied to the purposes of life; for it may safely be averred that nine lives out of ten are as much wasted in the living as they are worthless in the reading. Yet I do not altogether share my friend's wrath, righteous as it assuredly is, against the "autobiographies writ by other hands, the remains of worthy obscurities edited (with notes) by their relicts", and especially against the "self-written biography of the nobody-in-particular". These things must indeed be a great weariness to the conscientious reviewer who has any drop of human milk left in his poor ink-flushed veins. And there are a monstrous lot of them. The sons of the Knife-grinder have increased and multiplied to an appalling extent, and they seem to have inherited as little of their father's sense of proportion as of his modesty. But surely here again the remedy lies in our own hands, as the fault lies. We may wonder at the simple vanity which can suppose these Journals of a Retired Citizen likely to interest any rational human being; but we must wonder, too, at the taste of a public which can prove the egregious supposition true. We must remember also that the wise men of old believed that no biography when rightly done could be futile. That rare old biographer Johnson has left his opinion that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful. "For not only every man ", he wrote, " has in the mighty mass of the world great numbers in the same condition with himself, to whom his mistakes and miscarriages, escapes and expedients, would be of immediate and apparent use; but there is such an uniformity in the state of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarce any possibility of good or ill but is common to human kind. A great part of the time of those who are placed at the greatest distance by fortune or by temper must unavoidably pass in the same manner; and though, when the claims of nature are satisfied, caprice and vanity and accident begin to produce discriminations and peculiarities, yet the eye is not very heedful or quick which cannot discover the same causes still terminating their influence in the same effects, though sometimes accelerated, sometimes retarded or perplexed by multiplied combinations". And Carlyle (who was not unacquainted with Johnson's writings) professed himself to have discovered that "a true delineation of the smallest man, and his scene of pilgrimage through life, is capable of interesting the greatest man; that all men are to an unspeakable degree brothers, each man's life a strange emblem of every man's; and that Human Portraits, faithfully drawn, are of all pictures welcomed on human walls". He had, of course, just previously discounted this statement by another to the effect that the happiest man was he who was suffered to return silently, with his small, sorely foiled bit of work, to the Supreme Silences", with no biography written of him; and that, moreover, this particular man (the well-beloved John Sterling) was not of a kind to demand biography, either for his character's sake, his work's sake, or for any other thing that time, fate, or the world's lot had brought him. After which he proceeded to rescue his friend from the Supreme Silences in a volume of some three hundred pages-and a delightful volume it is. The good Doctor might have done better to stop at his judgment; his reasons for the popularity of biography go a little, I suspect, beyond the mark. The charm of biography (as separated from the mere vulgar love of prying into our neighbour's affairs) rests, I fancy, less on its moral profundity than on its natural magic. To use more familiar language, in this as well as in all other works of human hands, everything depends upon the style in which it is done; and the style in which modern biography is done is surely capable of some improvement. In the preface to those Lives of Twelve Good Men, which his own was not suffered to see published, Dean Burgon has left some uncommonly sensible remarks on this head. "I have long cherished the conviction " he wrote that it is to be wished that the world could be persuaded that biography might with advantage be confined within much narrower limits The Nile, The East, And yet with all this, there never surely was a time when so many books were written, or such long ones. Whose is the fault that the world cannot be persuaded of the eternal truth enunciated by Dean Burgon? Is it the readers', or the writers', or the publishers' Comes it from the world itself, from the flesh, or from-? It is hard to say. Of course the writers are not blameless. Books that will be read in a hurry will be written in a hurry, and, setting aside the mere physical labour of driving the pen over the paper, it is easier to make a long book than a short one. In the latter some sense of proportion is inevitable, there is room only for the essential fact; in the former the wallet of time is shaken out pell-mell at the reader's feet for him to pick out the essential facts himself, if he care and can. The printer is now the real biographer; a huge unsorted, undigested mass of letters, journals, commonplace-books, all the idle story of an empty day", are sent to the printer, and he prints them. Such things are not books at all, any more than a heap of bricks, stones, timbers and mortar make a house. A biography is the story of a life; but biographies as now published furnish only the materials out of which the reader may if he please construct the story. This method of book-making holds in some measure true, I may observe in passing, of other forms of literature than biography. It holds not a little true, for instance, in our historical literature, which certainly leaves something to be desired in point of composition, for all the vast industry and accuracy of its research,—or what we call so, for of course our sons will no more allow us to have been accurate than we allow our fathers to have been ; a fact which some of our historians might do well to remember when framing their indictments against their predecessors. No doubt there are moments when the very words of the actor give weight and reality to the scene; but long passages from charters, Acts of Parliament, despatches, speeches, while they certainly save the writer trouble, save him rather at the expense of the reader weight indeed they give, but 'tis too often a heavy and a weary weight. It was not in this way that Gibbon or Macaulay worked. It would be an impertinence to our historians to say, as Landor said of other writers, that he who trusts too much to quotation must be either ostentatious of his acquirements or doubtful of his cause; but certainly in what is essentially a narrative, its too frequent use must inevitably mar the beauty and unity of style. In the mass of rubbish which goes to swell the modern biography letters play by far the largest part. "I have neither space nor wish", wrote Mr. Ruskin in one of the early chapters of his Autobiography, "to extend my proposed account of things that have been by records of correspondence; it is too much the habit of modern biographers to confuse epistolary talk with vital fact". Mr. Ruskin has said many true things in his time, but it is long since he said anything whose truth was so pertinent to our occasions. The excuse made here is that a man should always where possible be suffered to tell his own story; but this excuse will hardly serve. For my own part I have never had a great passion for reading other folks' correspondence, but that of course is merely an instance of the personal sensation which, as we all should know, is the great foe of criticism, -and, as some of us will fancy, its great inspirer. Some of the most delightful passages in our literature are indeed to be found in letters, but they were mostly, I think, written before the penny post had killed the epistolary art. Some wise man has said that of all the methods men have devised for wasting time none is so popular and so fatal as writing idle letters, and naturally, for there is no device which cheats us with such a sense of employment. It is at least very certain that nine-tenths of the letters which make up nine-tenths of our current biographies tell no story, beyond the very bald one that they need not have been written and should certainly not have been kept. They are like nothing so much as those labours chronicled by the Gold Pen, which I trust I may be pardoned the liberty of profaning. Summons to bridal, banquet, burial, ball, Tradesman's polite reminder of his small Amount due Christmas last-I've printed all. Poor Diddler's tenth petition for a halfGuinea; Miss Bunyan's for an autograph. Can these things make the reader learn or laugh? I am a little doubtful, too, whether even the best of letters always serve the purpose claimed for them. Do they tell the writer's story? Did any writer ever put the whole truth and nothing but the truth about himself into a letter? I suspect they far more often tell the story of the receiver than the sender. The light they throw, to use the flattering phrase, is more often a side-light than a direct one. And there is another point. The more intimate, the more revealing a letter is, the more it shows us of the writer's self, the more prudence should surely be shown in printing it and certainly is not. Such confessions were not meant for the common eye. In reading these secrets of the grave, as one may call them, is there not something of the sense that one has opened a friend's desk in his absence and is making free with his private papers? This shamefacedness will be thought mere folly of course in these days when everything must to the papers; but I think some of us must have felt it when reading a certain volume of letters printed not long ago, though none of us, I suspect, let his sense of right interfere with his enjoyment of wrong. And still I am no nearer an answer to my question, who is to blame? The writers would hardly be encouraged to produce these immense bundles of scraps if the publishers did not find their account in them; and the publishers would hardly find their account in them if the public did not read them. The reviewers, it is true, occasionally protest; but who cares for a reviewer? We must suppose then that they find readers; but who are the readers? "The happiest mood of that man's mind, what can it be?" The fact is, I suppose, that there are people who regard a book as a means for passing the time; to sit in a chair and turn over the pages of a book is a cheap, easy and dignified mode of wearing through the long hours. Such folks must be branches of the great family which conceives itself to be getting culture by attending the private views of our picture-galleries and the first nights of our plays, which believes itself to be, as the newspapers assure it, representative of the wit and the learning, the genius and the love of our beautiful city. And to such the longer a book is, the more acceptable of course it will be; for the less often comes the trouble to find a fresh one. This is the only solution I can find to the problem; and if it be the true one, the world, I fear, will never be persuaded to Dean Burgon's view. OF A HISTORICAL NOVEL. "Who now reads historical novels?" asks the scornful critic, and the patient public, bowing low before the blast, buys eighteen thousand copies of a new edition of "Westward Ho!" within six months- another and a signal proof of the eternal war between Literature and Dogma ! The days of nothing good are gone, nor ever will go. The historical is no doubt the hardest of all forms of fiction to write well, and written ill, if there be a drearier waste of human effort than the theological novel, it is this; but, like the poet's little girl, when it is good, it is very good indeed, and will never fail to find readers; one has just been published (by Messrs. Longman) which should certainly not want them. The name of this story is "Micah Clarke", and of the writer, Conan Doyle. The time is the time of Monmouth's rebellion a time already chosen by Mr. Besant for his last novel, "For Faith and Freedom", which is also a good thing. The historical quality of Mr. Doyle's tale lies. rather in the time than the characters. Monmouth is there, of course, and Lord Grey of Wark, Judge Jeffreys and the wretched fanatic Ferguson, the Plotter. Monmouth is well |