On Brief Biographies

ONE need not invoke the experience of a diner-out to learn that of all old stories those about famous men best bear repetition, and it is common experience that the lives of our national heroes seldom pall upon us, no matter how often they are retold. Even the changes of form they undergo are but slight. Each generation, to be sure, has its variations of style and fashion in the matter of history and biography, but they are seldom important. If our own time were conscious of having a biographical mode, it is likely that the concise and terse lives of the Beacon and Riverside series of biographies would be in the height of fashion. In their brevity and directness they give the very accent of the time, — its impatience of preface, prologue, and all the cumbrous circumstance of three-volume leisure. Yet, by what seems at first too fortunate a chance to be anything but the luckiest coincidence, they have fallen into the same form as Plutarch’s incomparable Lives.

At a further glance, however, one sees that this compact, convenient form is not less eminently apt and appropriate for American than it was for Roman biography. The records out of which the lives of our men of mark must be made are for the most part few, and often ill authenticated. The civilization in which many of them grew up was an austere one. Many of them came to maturity in that poverty of which annals are proverbially few. Of Daniel Boone and Stonewall Jackson there are few records, few letters, few mementos. These were men of action, taken up with strenuous toil; but even of a man quite of another stripe, and living in another environment, Francis Parkman, a similar thing is true. Apart from his labors which are in his books, there is little to say of him. For these men the natural, fit, and proper biography is a brief one, such as would fall well within the limits of these little series.

The obvious excellence of our brief biographies is the Plutarchan one of portability ; something, to be sure, they leave to be desired of Plutarch’s rare sense of proportion and gift of wise reticence. Sometimes, too, they obviously gain their portability with no gain of grace, as if their authors had forgotten that the precious may be as tempting as the convenient. At their best, however, they are not unworthy their high model. The life of Phillips Brooks in the Beaeon series, by the editor of the series, and that of Andrew Jackson in the Riverside group, are notable successes. The former is an admirable example of sound proportion and careful workmanship ; the latter is as spirited and lifelike a portrait as we have of the grim Southern leader on any scale. These two successes are intimations that we may find in these brief biographies not only welcome reappearances of old favorites, but the permanent and final “lives” of some of our most famous men.