The Studies of a Biographer

“WHEN I read the book, the biography famous, ” remarked Walt Whitman, “ and is this then (said I) what the author calls a man’s life . . . why, even I myself, I often think, know little or nothing of my real life ; only a few hints, — a few diffused faint clues and indirections.” There are doubtless few meditative readers who have not at some time or other been driven by a smart, impertinent biography into this agnosticism ; nor are there likely to be many more who have not some time been led through reflection upon the shadowy, inward flow of personality to distrust even the great biographies. If there is any short and easy method with the skeptical majority, it is to commend to their reading Sir Leslie Stephen’s Studies of a Biographer. With his wonted modesty, — a modesty that is one of the most effective literary weapons of our time, — Sir Leslie would surely disclaim any intention of doing more than to catch and convey a few hints and indirections. Nevertheless his native genius for biography has been so trained by long delving amid tlie myriad human records from which the great Dictionary of National Biography was composed, that his power of seizing the significant fact is accompanied by a rare gift of almost instinctive generalization, whereby the convincing, and, as it were, evidential resurrection of a man is accomplished.

Almost without exception the essays in these four volumes were written as review articles upon the appearance of some important, or otherwise considerable, biographic work. It is pretty certain that the “reviewals ” were not uniformly gratifying to the writers of the works under review; for Sir Leslie Stephen has a way of gracefully assembling their painfully acquired information into portraits of their subjects quite different from theirs. But this faculty which tends to their exasperation promotes our delight. He knows, none better, the trade of the biographical delver, who, as he says, “is at least laying bricks, not blowing futile soap-bubbles, ” but his own true work is of the imagination. He has that deep feeling, to which the unaided and unimaginative Skeptical Understanding rarely attains, that “our ancestors were once as really alive as we are now.” Hence when he writes of an author, whether of old time or of to-day, his aim is to know the man rather than to “criticise ” his work ; indeed he willfully holds that the root of the matter is in “working with a will and defying the critics and all their ways.”

But at no point is Sir Leslie Stephen more sharply distinguished from the unimaginative delver than in his skill at selecting and weaving into his narrative little human ironies from the lives and works of unread, often of unreadable authors. How good it is to know of John Byrom’s forgotten “pastoral ” addressed to Phebe, that “a Mr. Mills, years afterwards, kissed the book when he read it; ” how engaging is the image of Boyse, “whose only clothing was a blanket with holes in it through which his hands protruded to manufacture verses; ” and what is more delightful and suggestive than to learn that “Arthur Bedford, an orthodox clergyman, had (in 1719) collected seven thousand immoral sentiments from British dramatists.”

Notwithstanding these numerous and sprightly graces, there is nothing in any essay to suggest the “Sympathetic Interpreter, ” whose biographical writing is the most insidious of corruptions. Sir Leslie Stephen is always more concerned with character than with temperament, with ideas than with moods. He grasps the notions dominating his subjects firmly, and he expounds them lucidly, often with sweetly provoking coolness and poise. The range of his biographical comprehension as it is indicated in these Studies is very noteworthy. Viewing the gathering as a wrhole, we find it curiously divided. There is a group of men of imagination, spontaneity, and somewhat wayward impulse, studied with a certain sympathetic enthusiasm, and yet with his tongue in his cheek, so to say: Froude, Donne, Stevenson, Arthur Young, Wordsworth in his youth, Emerson, Ruskin; then comes a quartette of queer doctrinaires, dry-workers, vain men, Byrom, Godwin, Trollope, Boswell, all portrayed with nothing less than affection; Shakespeare, Scott, Milton, Gibbon, the heavy - metaled authors, are studied with a realizing understanding and a happy absence of breathlessness; while Tennyson and Jowett, hesitant believers, who, as Sir Leslie thinks, subjugated reason to a wish, are rather rudely, though subtilely, mocked at. In none of the above cases is there any lack of intellectual comprehension, but perhaps he is in most brilliant touch with the kindly, half-cynical moralists, fervent skeptics, whimsical and witty reformers, in short, with men like Holmes, Pascal, and Bageliot; and he is all for Johnson. To complete the catalogue, mention must be made of some half-dozen more discursive essays on such tempting themes as National Biography, In Praise of Walking, or The Evolution of Editors.

It were a pleasant adventure to traverse some or all of these papers, to resay their good things, perhaps, very mildly and meekly, to disagree with some of them; how fain, for example, would one fence with him, for a passado or two, as to The Evolution of Editors. Sir Leslie Stephen, the reader must be regretfully informed, is but little impressed by the Divinity which doth hedge an Editor; indeed, he scientifically traces his evolution out of Grub Street, and boldly asserts that even in the proud consciousness of your full-blown editor the sense of genius is not always constant, and in that profound the vision of Grub Street, an awful possibility, darkly rises. But, as must always be the case with any book that is a book, the author is more interesting than his subjects, or than any of his pronouncements. It will be better to leave the adjudication of moot points to the reader’s leisure, and see what result a humble application of our author’s method to his own writings will yield us.

The most personal and characteristic trait in all these collected essays is the continual play of a kind of ironical casuistry. On every page we see a keen and brilliant intellect seeking to ease the burden of the mystery, or of sad conviction, by the exercise of witty logic.

“A conscience is,” he says, speaking of Rugby, “ no doubt a very useful possession in early years. But when a man has kept one till middle life, he ought to have established a certain modus vivendi with it; it should be absorbed and become part of himself, — not a separate faculty for delivering oracular utterances. The amiable weakness of the Rugby school was a certain hypertrophy of the conscience. ” Or take his wicked fling at Matthew Arnold: “And I have often wished, I must also confess, that I too had a little sweetness and light, that I might be able to say such nasty things of my enemies.”

But perhaps the best example of this ironical casuistry is in a hypothetical reply which he frames to certain contentions of Pascal’s: —

“According to you the slightest belief is a sufficient reason. Then why try to hold an absolute belief? After all, if there be such a God as you suppose, He may choose — it is not a very wild hypothesis — to damn me for lying or deliberate self-deception. If, as we are supposing, He has not supplied me with evidence of a fact, He may be angry with me for deliberately manufacturing beliefs without evidence, — for believing absolutely what I can only know to be probable; He may do so, — if we may venture to attribute to Him a certain magnanimity, — even if the fact considered be the fact of His own existence. You contemplate a Deity who wishes to be believed to all hazards, even if He has not given reasons for belief, even therefore if the demand imply the grossest injustice. What is the chance that God, if there be a God, acts on this principle, and not on the opposite principle ? ”

Here is a faculty which would have adorned a Jesuit’s chair; but it is to be noted that Sir Leslie’s casuistry is always, as has been said, ironical, and but rarely the vehicle of his own convictions. He professes himself — ironically perhaps — a “ Lockist, ” yet he contrives to avoid falling in with any philosophic sect, and always maintains an individual point of view, whence, Montaigne-like, he may poke fun at the fallacies of all. He assumes the rôle of filus terrœ, who was anciently appointed to make sport of persons in high places, lest they become overweening. Cambridge was his university, and, as he more than once reminds us, Cambridge has always been a little distrustful of Oxford with her “mighty voices,” spiritual guides, and Platonic dreamers. Lockist as he is, he is never cold to any unaffected enthusiasm for an ideal, — of Emerson as the typical American idealist he is keenly appreciative, — but in the long run his true sympathy is with the more generous sort of utilitarian. A man’s deepest predilection is pretty sure to crop out in his daydreaming ; there is in the essay on Gibbon a whimsically lyrical passage about the mid-eighteenth century which is significant : —

“When I indulge in day-dreams, I take flight with the help of Gibbon, or Boswell, or Horace Walpole, to that delightful period. I take the precaution, of course, to be born the son of a prime minister, or, at least, within the charmed circle where sinecure offices may be the reward of a judicious choice of parents. There, methinks, would be enjoyment, more than in this march of mind, as well as more than in the state of nature on the islands where one is mated with a squalid savage. There I can have philosophy enough to justify at once my self-complacency in my wisdom, and acquiescence in established abuses. I make the grand tour for a year or two on the Continent, and find myself at once recognized as a philosopher and statesman simply because I am an Englishman. I become an honorary member of the tacit cosmopolitan association of philosophers, which formed Parisian salons, or collected around Voltaire at Ferney. I bring home a sufficient number of pictures to ornament a comfortable villa on the banks of the Thames; and form a good solid library in which I write books for the upper circle, without bothering myself about the Social Question or Bimetallism, or swallowing masses of newspaper and magazine articles to keep myself up to date. I belong to a club or two in London, with Johnson and Charles Fox, the authors and the men of fashion, in which I can ‘ fold my legs and have my talk out, ’ and actually hear talk which is worth writing down. If I do not aspire to be one of the great triumvirate of which Gibbon was proud to be a member, I fancy at least I can allow my thoughts to ripen and mellow into something as neat and rounded as becomes a fine gentleman.”

If we read with this a more seriously intended complementary and correcting passage concerning Arnold’s poetic melancholy, we shall be not far away from our sturdy essayist’s central thought:—

“The universe is open to a great many criticisms ; there is plenty of cause for tears and for melancholy; and great poets in all ages have, because they were great poets, given utterance to the sorrows of their race. But I don’t feel disposed to grumble at the abundance of interesting topics or the advance of scientific knowledge, because some inconveniences result from both. I say all this simply as explaining why the vulgar — including myself — fail to appreciate these musical moans over spilt milk, which represent rather a particular eddy in an intellectual revolution than the deeper and more permanent emotions of human nature.”

For all his ironical casuistry and mocking wit, it is always these deeper and more permanent emotions of human nature which warm and vitalize Sir Leslie Stephen’s writing. His cool, familiar manner, so express and admirable, tells of turbulence subdued; and reveals rather than hides the mellow soundness of the writer. He is the chief biographical craftsman of English Literature, and the Dictionary of National Biography is a practical achievement which must have brought its first editor a fuller joy “than the conquest of Persia to the Macedonian.” But there are valid standards judged by which these occasional essays are more memorable than the Dictionary or than the magnum opus on the English Utilitarians. Though cast in the form of Biographical Studies, they are really discursive moral essays in which, through delightful, unaffected discourse, sanity, sincere truth, right feeling, the things that are eternally worth while, are seen for what they are.

F. G.