The New Biography: Ludwig, Maurois, and Strachey

No feature of the literary history of Europe in the last few years is more remarkable than the simultaneous appearance in Germany, France, and England of a new conception of biography. Emil Ludwig in Germany, André Maurois in France, and Lytton Strachey in England have not only produced a new type of biography, but have made it immensely popular. Each author has multitudes of readers and schools of imitators in his own country, and each has been translated into the languages of the other two and in these other languages found readers as appreciative, as enthusiastic even, as in his own.

The amazing similarity both in philosophical conception and in literary style and structure of the work of these writers constitutes a problem of the highest interest. What is the explanation of this similarity? Perhaps a brief survey of the outstanding characteristics of the new biography may suggest a solution of this problem.

I

In the first place, the new biography expresses itself in the form of the novel, or even of the drama, rather than in that of history. That the biographer may be regarded as a novelist is, in fact, suggested by Maurois. In his introductory note to Ariel he points out that his aim has been that of a novelist rather than that of a historian or a critic. To be sure, he adds, the facts are true, and no single phrase or idea has been attributed to Shelley which is not indicated in the memoirs of his friends and in his own letters or poems, but the ‘endeavor has been made to arrange these genuine elements in such a way as to produce the impression of progressive discovery and natural development characteristic of the novel.’

How does the novel differ from traditional historical biography? It would be easy to reply that biography describes persons who really lived, whereas the novel pictures creatures of the imagination. But the difference lies deeper than that. Mr. E. M. Forster in his Aspects of the Novel draws a distinction between the real man, homo sapiens, and the character in a novel, homo fictus, and maintains that we know more about homo fictus, the character in a novel, than about any human being. Our friends, our wives, our children, remain for us mysterious beings. The character in a novel, on the other hand, is intelligible because the man who narrates the tale is the creator of the character, which is therefore transparent to him. If God would write the history of the universe, this would be a novel.

The new biography has so completely understood the principal actors in the history of the periods portrayed that it describes them as if it had created them. Thus we reach the paradox that the new biography produces the impression of reality because the principal actors create the illusion that they are the characters in a novel. If the reader of the new biography sometimes feels a sudden doubt whether these people ever lived at all, it is not because they seem improbable, but because they seem too probable to be real.

Fiction does not seek to create mere illusion; it seeks to create the illusion of reality. And it is because the writer of fiction has been so successful in producing the sense of reality, and the traditional biographer, with his appeal to veracity, has been so unsuccessful, that the new biography has adopted the methods of fiction and has, by means of them, brilliantly succeeded in re-creating reality.

The characters in a good novel are three-dimensional: they have not only height and breadth, but depth. Too often the personages in the traditional biography are two-dimensional. They are flat simulacra. The new biography, adopting the form of the novel, is stereoscopic. Its portraits have depth as well as height. They are painted from the life and executed in color.

The new biography, in employing the methods of fiction, does not produce works of fiction. The new biography does not turn out historical novels. It is extremely vivid in presentation, but it is accurate to the minutest detail. It never invents, but it does try to recreate. The lives of the new biography are not like Plutarch’s Lives. If we wish to find an analogy with the new biography in ancient literature, we must go back to the history of Thucydides, consciously planned as a dramatic struggle of the Fates, or to the last three books of Herodotus, with their combination of veracity and dramatic movement.

II

The second main characteristic of the new biography is its emphasis on design. It often recalls, in this respect, the drama rather than the novel. Ludwig, for instance, divides his Kaiser Wilhelm II into three parts, one might almost say three acts, entitled ‘Accession,’ ‘Power,’ ‘Expiation.’ Again, Ludwig’s Goethe is written in three volumes, constructed like three acts of a play, and his biography of Bismarck is a trilogy essentially similar to the trilogy of plays on Bismarck which he put on the German stage. Ludwig was, in fact, a dramatist before he became a biographer. He wrote a drama in verse on Napoleon nearly twenty years before he produced his biography of him. Ludwig’s biographical work is essentially dramatic.

As contrasted with the dull twovolume biography that continues on its way from prosaic birth to prosaic death, the new biography presents the life it chronicles, with a due sense of design, as an organic unity, in which each episode and incident is an essential contribution to the whole. Disraeli, when a discussion was taking place on the subject, ‘What is the most desirable life?’ suddenly asserted that it was a splendid and continuous procession from youth to the grave. The new biography seeks to represent every life as a procession, as something consciously or unconsciously organized, often indeed not splendid, but always continuous.

Strachey, indeed, sometimes appears to disclaim any conscious design, as when in the preface to Eminent Victorians he explains his conception of biography. ‘The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. . . . It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narrator that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket , which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity. ... It has been my purpose to illustrate rather than to explain.'

But, if we examine Strachey’s practice rather than his theory, we shall find throughout his work every evidence of conscious design, every evidence of a strong dramatic sense. It is this sense of the dramatic which leads him to take infinite care with the opening and closing phrases of each essay. There is always an unforgettable picture like the drop scene in a drama. Take, for example, the final paragraph of his essay on Cardinal Manning: ‘And he who descends into the crypt of that cathedral which Manning never lived to see will observe in the first niche with the sepulchral monument that the dust lies thick on the strange, the incongruous, the almost impossible object which, with the elaborations of dependent tassels, hangs down from the dim vault like some forlorn and forgotten trophy — the Hat.'

Even more striking is the description of the last moments of Queen Victoria: ‘Perhaps her fading mind called up once more the shadows of the past to float before it, and retraced, for the last time, the vanished visions of that long history — passing back and back through the cloud of years, to older and ever older memories — to the spring woods at Osborne, so full of primroses for Lord Beaconsfield — to Lord Palmerston’s queer clothes and high demeanor, and Albert’s face under the green lamp, and Albert’s first stag at Balmoral and Albert in his blue and silver uniform, and the Baron coming in through a doorway, and Lord M. dreaming at Windsor with the rooks cawing in the elm trees, and the Archbishop of Canterbury on his knees in the dawn, and the old king’s turkey-cock ejaculations, and Uncle Leopold’s soft voice at Claremont, and Lehzen with the globes, and her mother’s feathers sweeping down toward her, and a great old repeater-watch of her father’s in its tortoise-shell case, and a yellow rug, and some friendly flounces of sprigged muslin, and the trees and the grass at Kensington.'

If the Queen’s thoughts were not these, we say to ourselves as we read, they should have been. How perfect the skill of this intellectual creation. How naturally the dying Queen’s thoughts — the dying woman’s thoughts, for on her deathbed she was a simple old woman — pass back from the recent to the remote, and from the precisely articulated to the blurred dimness which merges into the ultimate mystery.

And Maurois’s conclusion to his Disraeli is not less remarkable. Referring to the words of Bell, some years after Disraeli’s death, on seeing Disraeli’s statue covered with primroses, ‘They have canonized him as a saint!’ he exclaims: ‘No, Disraeli was very far from being a saint. But perhaps as some old Spirit of Spring, ever vanquished and ever alive, and as a symbol of what can be accomplished, in a cold and hostile universe, by a long youthfulness of heart.’

Ludwig fully shares with the other founders of the new biography the conviction of the necessity of dramatic scenes at the rise and the fall of the curtain. Kaiser Wilhelm II, for example, begins with the poignant scene at the birt h of the Kaiser where the anguished women whispered around the unconscious child-mother and the inert infant whom for an hour and a half destiny hesitated to allow to live.

Most dramatic of all is the final scene. The Kaiser is at the Dutch frontier. He who has never waited six minutes is forced to wait six hours while at The Hague his fate is being decided. And as he waits he looks back on his life. ‘Chaos envelops his country, and while millions of wretched folk watch the approach of poverty and slavery, he who alone is responsible steps into a well-sprung car and flies for refuge to the comfort of a peaceful land.’ Destiny, which had governed his every action, had forced him to this final indignity.

III

The new biography is characterized by another quality that is not inconsistent with its dramatic sense. It is essentially detached and dispassionate. The biographer of the new school is neither a hero worshiper nor a detractor. His standpoint is that of the spectator, the impartial observer. It would not be possible for the biographer to interpret with perfect understanding the lives of diverse characters if he did not maintain a standpoint of detachment. Ludwig has written not only of Goethe and Byron and Rembrandt and Beethoven, but of Napoleon and Bismarck and Lenin and Wilson; Maurois not only of Shelley and Byron and Mrs. Siddons, but of Disraeli; Strachey not only of Queen Victoria, but of Voltaire and Manning, Rousseau and General Gordon. There is a universality of spirit, an almost superhuman isolation, in the authors of the new biography.¹

But, though the biographer is an impartial observer, he is always an interested and even inquisitive observer. Strachey, in his essay on Manning, writes: ‘ It may be instructive, and even amusing, to look a little more closely into the complexities of so curious a story.’ This is always the spirit of the new biography. The new biography is not only instructive, but also amusing, and the story it tells is always complex and curious. It is sure that even in familiar country there are interesting and amusing things to be seen, things that have escaped minds less alert and eyes less clairvoyant.

The new biographer observes his field from an aeroplane. From there he can see all over the main features of the countryside; he can discern more easily than the man on the ground the lie of the land, the precise point which divides the watersheds, the main direction of the flow of a stream amid its frequent meanderings. Compare Ludwig’s Kaiser Wilhelm II with Viscount Grey’s Twenty-Five Years. Grey is on the ground. As one of the chief actors in the drama, he follows the flow of the stream, now east, now west, now north, now south, and gives the reader the impression that it is by mere chance that the stream finally finds itself south, and not north, of its source. Ludwig, on the other hand, surveying the area of the past as it were from above, not only leaves the reader in no doubt that the stream, in spite of its meanderings, is flowing south, but, by drawing his attention to two or three salient features of the landscape, shows that its southerly flow is inevitable.

IV

But, however detached the new biography may be, it always insists on the enduring humanity of its characters. Its personages are not dead specimens to be examined through the microscope of time. ‘Human beings,’ says Strachey, in his preface to Eminent Victorians, ‘are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal processes — which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake.’

When Ludwig wrote as the subtitle of his Goethe, ‘The Story of a Man,’he put into this phrase the whole purpose of the book. It was an effort to describe the human side of a man of genius.

It is perhaps the main secret of the popularity of the new biography that those who move across its pages are felt to be no mere marionettes, but ordinary human beings of flesh and blood. Strachey never tires of emphasizing the underlying humanity of his characters. ‘Lord Melbourne was always human, supremely human — too human perhaps.’ Of the Prince Consort he writes: ‘ By a curious irony, an impeccable waxwork had been fixed by the Queen’s love in the popular imagination, while the creature whom it represented — the real creature, so full of energy and stress and torment, so mysterious and so unhappy, and so fallible, and so very human — has altogether disappeared.’

He frequently corrects tradition by this emphasis on common humanity. Florence Nightingale was traditionally a somewhat amorphous ‘ministering angel,’ the gentle ‘lady with the lamp.’ Strachey shows her as a very human woman with a dangerous temper and indomitable will.

Maurois also loses no opportunity of bringing out the common human nature of his personages. What could be more enlightening than his description of Disraeli’s and Bismarck’s private conversations at the Congress of Berlin? ‘They became great friends, taking a curious pleasure in talking shop together. They liked to exchange notes about their relations with princes, ministers, and parliaments. It is so rare for a prime minister to find a confrère. When he does meet him, he can’t help being drawn to him.’

The biographers of the new school stress the underlying humanity of their characters because they are all profound psychologists. Ludwig in particular possesses an almost uncanny power of probing actions and discovering the hidden motives that led to them. All his life he has been a student of psychology. At t he university he produced a thesis on ‘Emotional Murder.’ His first attempt at biography was a psychological essay on Bismarck, a sort of crayon study for the more detailed portrait of later years. His elaborate character study of William II is a penetrating psychological analysis, illustrated by striking instances of the Emperor’s dominant traits, his arrogance, vanity, Cæsarism, instability, charm, and prodigality.

Maurois also is a penetrating psychologist, and he has an advantage over Ludwig in possessing a keen sense of humor. After describing Disraeli’s dandyism, he writes: ‘How weary he sometimes was of all this play-acting; how tired he was of being Disraeli. His silences became longer and more pregnant, burdened with drab cogitations which he would suddenly bring to an end with a sarcasm. The years were passing: thirty-two years old: old age — for a page.'

Or take the brilliant character study of Disraeli as he appeared to the country gentlemen in Parliament. ‘Although he now dressed in black, the shape of his face alone gave him, in the midst of them, the air of an ibis or a flamingo in an English poultry yard. When the sun lit up the Conservative benches, all their faces became paler, but his more dark.’

Not less keen is Strachey’s psychological insight. Of the Queen as a girl, referring to some entry in her diary, Strachey writes: ‘One seems to hold in one’s hand a small smooth crystal pebble, without a flaw and without a scintillation, and so transparent that one can see through it at a glance. Yet perhaps, after all, to the discerning eye the purity would not be absolute. The careful searcher might detect, in the virgin soil, the first faint traces of an unexpected vein.’

V

Is it their psychological analysis or some common philosophical basis that leads these three biographers to refer again and again to the manifestations of Fate, of preordained destiny? It is in Ludwig’s work that the references are most striking and perhaps most disconcerting, but for the other two writers also Fate plays a role of the first importance. One or two instances will be enough to illustrate this.

Referring to the world-chorus of denunciation of the Kaiser as a modern Attila, Ludwig says: ‘Even if he were firmly convinced that he was not Attila, he did not forget that he had commanded his troops to follow the example of the Huns. It was then, faced by the terrible results of his childish gesture, that the Kaiser began to appear in a tragic light, for the evil with which nature had afflicted him was due not to any fault of his own, but to Fate.’

Again, Ludwig shows how Fate implacably destroyed one after another of the three rivals for supreme influence over the Kaiser and the German people, and not only so, but how Fate used the rivals to destroy one another. ‘First it reduced Eulenburg, through Holstein, to semi-impotence; then Holstein, through Eulenburg and Bülow, to complete impotence. Then it led, through Bülow, to the eclipse of the Emperor, and finally, through the Emperor, to the fall of Bülow.’

For Maurois and for Strachey, while Fate is important, its rôle is not necessarily tragic. It provides an element of incalculability and imponderability. Maurois for instance, moralizes on the strangeness of Fate in that Disraeli always fails to secure election at Wycombe, where he believes himself to be known and respected, and suddenly succeeds at Maidstone, to which a week before he has been a complete stranger.

Strachey frequently reflects on destiny in connection with the amazing figure of Stockmar. Just before the death of William IV and the accession of Victoria, Stockmar was sent to England by King Leopold. ‘Thus once again, as if in accordance with some preordained destiny, the figure of Stockmar is discernible — inevitably present at a momentous hour.’ Again, he describes Stockmar’s reflections on the Prince Consort. ‘ But had the Baron no misgivings? Did he never wonder whether, perhaps, he might have accomplished not too little but too much? How subtle and how dangerous are the snares which Fate lays for the wariest of men! Albert, certainly, seemed to be everything that Stockmar could have wished — virtuous, industrious, persevering, intelligent. And yet — why was it? — all was not well with him. He was sick at heart.’ And finally, when Albert died: ‘One human being, and one alone, felt the full power of what had happened. The Baron, by his fireside at Coburg, suddenly saw the tremendous fabric of his creation crash down into sheer and irremediable ruin. Albert was gone, and he had lived in vain.’

No doubt because of its preoccupation with Fate, the new biography reveals an undercurrent of melancholy. Life may, indeed, be full of gayety and high spirits, but is it not, in the end, an empty mockery? No passages in Maurois’s Ariel or Disraeli make a greater impression on the mind than those in which he shows his two subjects alone but for the memories of the past. All those whom they had loved were dead. Shelley and Disraeli had both lived lives full of sound and color, and yet both felt that life was hollow; that it was a disappointment, and perhaps a deception.

Describing Disraeli at the zenith of his power, Maurois writes: ‘At last he has in his grasp the object of his lifelong desire — power. ... A princess of the blood royal is just a woman for whom he refuses to be disturbed. The Queen is a familiar figure, an old friend, a little difficult perhaps, but with whom he is on the best of terms. Now he has really reached the summit. He no longer feels the restless need to mount ever higher. At last he should be happy.’ But he is not happy. Success has come too late. ‘Hardly has he formed his ministry than his old body begins to give way; he has gout and has to go to Parliament in slippers; he has asthma and it tires him to speak. And no one but the faithful Montagu Corry to look after him.’

Compare with this, as an essay on the vanity of human wishes, Ludwig’s description of the Kaiser. ‘ For William the days of his brilliance were past. He had reigned twenty years and was now fifty years old. He was becoming slightly gray, and although his subjects did not perceive it, things around him were also becoming gray. . . .His friends were proscribed, and with them his last advisers had disappeared, the brilliant chancellor and the devoted confidant, both of whom had witnessed the struggles of his youth and the pomp of his maturity. The very court, with its icy brilliance, seemed more of a desert, and more than one prince of the blood fled the capital. Hunting and processions, even the beloved journeys, were now nothing but a twice-told tale. A fourth-act atmosphere enveloped this monarch who till then had known nought but happiness and exaltation.’

In Strachey, too, we find an underlying touch of melancholy, which sometimes develops into cynicism. Of Sidney Herbert he writes: ‘ In the end, the career of Sidney Herbert seemed to show that, with all their generosity, there was some gift or other — what was it? — some essential gift — which the good fairies had withheld, and that even the qualities of a perfect English gentleman may be no safeguard against anguish, humiliation, and defeat.’ And, again, of the English Constitution and the Prince Consort: ‘But what chance gave, chance took away. The Consort perished in his prime; and the English Constitution, dropping the dead limb with hardly a tremor, continued its mysterious life as if he had never been.’

VI

If now we pass from t he philosophic basis of the new biography to its outward expression, we find its style to be one of conscious and sustained brilliance. There is nothing haphazard or pedestrian about it. It has an instinct for exact values. Pains are taken to make every word tell. Sentences are constructed like mosaics, like brightly colored mosaics. Sometimes, indeed, particularly in Strachey and Maurois, the choice of words is almost too precious. In such a passage as the following, where Strachey is writing of Newman, the effort to get the right word becomes too obvious: ‘ A dreamer whose secret spirit dwelt apart in delectable mountains, an artist whose subtle senses caught, like a shower in the sunshine, the impalpable rainbow of the immaterial world.’ Or take a passage from Maurois: ‘Hughenden, solitude, books, the past. . . . Disraeli likes to warm his old limbs in the sun, and in the evening to walk beneath the stars at the Shakespearean hour when the bats begin their gray gliding.’ But such exaggerated phrases are the exception. In general, the style of the new biography is brilliant indeed, but restrained and economical.

The French of Maurois, the English of Strachey, and the German of Ludwig all embody the three qualities which Maupassant claimed as specially characteristic of the French language — ‘ The nature of that language is to be clear, logical, and animated.’ ‘Style,’ John Addington Symonds long ago remarked, ‘is not so much a matter of linguistic resources as of the art and tact with which those resources are husbanded for use.’ The resources of the English, French, and German languages are very different, and very different also the national styles, but art and tact have enabled each biographer to fashion his own language into an almost perfect instrument for his needs. The art of the three writers so transcends national idiosyncrasies that their books read as well in translations as in the original language.

The new biography exploits every means of securing vividness. Epigram, paradox, irony, antithesis, rhetorical questions, and obiter dicta all serve to vivify the narration, to give it light and shade, to introduce color and sound. No reader’s attention can wander when he finds that Ludwig entitles his chapter on the Kaiser’s accession ‘Too Soon’; that Strachey writes of the virtues of Victoria, ‘Even the very chairs and tables had assumed, with a singular responsiveness, the forms of prim solidity: the Victorian Age was in full swing’; and that Maurois says of Disraeli as leader of his party in the House of Commons, ‘The Whigs sent Stanley such reports on him as a colonial official might send on a native chief who had lately submitted.’

The new biography loves also to paint brightly colored tableaux. Take, for instance, Maurois’s description of Hyndman’s interview with Disraeli. ‘Hyndman was taken into a room with walls of red and gold in which the gilt chairs were covered with red damask, He was kept a moment waiting, then the door opened and a strange figure made its appearance. An old man, clad in a long red dressing gown and a red fez, his head bowed on his breast, one eye completely closed, the other only half open. Under the fez showed the shiny curve of the last black curl. . . . The old man sat down and remained without a movement and without a word.’

All three writers alike give free rein to their impulse to paint pictures: Shelley’s funeral pyre on the seashore near Viareggio, Gordon alone in the Residence at Khartum, Napoleon’s escape from Elba.

In this respect the new biography is undoubtedly akin to the best traditions of the cinematograph. The aim of cinematographic art is to concentrate on brilliant images, on significant incidents, on episodes trivial in themselves, but important for the comprehension of the character portrayed. This is precisely what the new biography does. It omits 99 per cent of the dull, humdrum, everyday occurrences, and emphasizes the high lights. If the great French film ‘Napoleon’ be compared with Ludwig’s Napoleon, the similarities immediately leap to view.

But, though the new biography uses images, it does not think in images. However episodic its structure may sometimes appear, the episodes are never isolated. They are always carefully coordinated. Style, it has been said, consists in the art of transition — that is, the art of moving easily and convincingly from point to point, supplying the needful correlations without clumsiness. These three writers all excel in their transitions. This is, in fact, implied in the similarity of their works to novels or plays. In a novel or a play the story moves from point to point by almost unnoticed transitions. Real life, however, appears to have its ragged edges, its false starts, its gaps and lacunæ. The traditional biography emphasizes these loose ends. It is the mark of the new biography, while being intensely realistic, to view its subjects sub specie œternitatis, and to show each incident in its proper perspective as a necessary element in the whole.

VII

We have seen that the new biography, as practised by Strachey, Maurois, and Ludwig, is extraordinarily uniform in conception, in structure, in philosophy, and even in literary style. How can we account for such singular similarities? How explain the practically simultaneous emergence in the three great languages of Europe of an identical literary form?

Is there perhaps some common origin, or is one of these writers the fons et origo, and the other two merely brilliant imitators? Historically, Strachey’s and Ludwig’s work appeared before that of Maurois. Eminent Victorians, in which all the characteristics of the new biography appear, was published in 1918, and Queen Victoria in 1921. Ludwig’s Goethe appeared in 1919, and his other great works, Napoleon, Bismarck, and Kaiser Wilhelm II, at intervals in the next six or seven years.

Both writers, it is true, had produced books before these. Strachey, before the war, had written a book on Landmarks in French Literature, and Ludwig had produced, in addition to large numbers of plays, two biographical essays, that on Bismarck already mentioned and a study of Wagner. But, while these early studies already contained some of the characteristics of the new biography, it was the post-war works which really created the new tradition.

Maurois entered the field definitely later than the other two. His Ariel, an imperfect example of the new biography, appeared in 1923, and his Disraeli not until 1927. (Maurois’s first book, Les Silences du Colonel Bramble, not a biography, was published in 1921. Before the war he had published a few articles in reviews.)

Historically, therefore, Strachey and Ludwig were first in the field. Is there any evidence of direct indebtedness of one to the other or of Maurois to either? It would be difficult to claim this. There is certainly no indication of any mutual influence exerted by Strachey and Ludwig. The ingenious critic might, however, attempt to prove that Maurois sometimes owes something directly to Strachey. Among the sources he quotes for his life of Disraeli, he mentions Strachey’s Queen Victoria and Eminent Victorians. Although his view of Disraeli is more favorable than that of Strachey (he would never have referred to the old man on his deathbed, as Strachey does, as ‘the strange old comedian ’), he clearly made a good deal of use of Strachey’s chapter on ‘Mr. Gladstone and Lord Beaconsfield’ in Queen Victoria. But Maurois’s general attitude to Disraeli differs greatly from Strachey’s. Maurois would never speak, as Strachey does, of Disraeli’s ‘rococo allurements,’ his ‘phrases of baroque convolution,’ and his ‘strain of charlatanism.’ In their descriptions of the unconventional audacity of the Prime Minister in proposing the health of the Queen-Empress at the dinner at Windsor on the day of the Delhi Proclamation, the differences in style between the two biographers emerge in an interesting way. Strachey, after referring to the ease with which Disraeli had always read in women’s hearts, says with regard to the Queen, ‘He surveyed what was before him with the eye of a past master, and he was not for a moment at a loss.’ Maurois, alluding to the same circumstances, says, ‘ He looked with an expert eye on this august widow, with her white tulle cap, waiting for him at the top of the state staircase, and he felt delightfully at his ease.’ A comparison of the two sentences immediately indicates the two characteristics which differentiate Strachey and Maurois. Strachey is more economical of his words. Maurois, while loving an epigram as much as Strachey, often lets his pen run away with him. Again, Maurois is more colorful and less restrained than Strachey. The meaning of the two sentences quoted is precisely the same, but Maurois adds two touches of color, the white tulle cap and the state staircase.

There is no evidence whatever, if we compare the work of the three biographers, that any one is in any sense the master, the founder of the school, and the other two his followers.

More plausible is the second hypothesis that we have mentioned, the possibility of a common source of inspiration. This common source exists, at any rate in the case of Strachey and Maurois. It is to be found in the French biographers of the eighteenth century. Strachey is a profound student of French literature, and his crystalline, epigrammatic, and nervous style undoubtedly owes much to it. In his preface to Eminent Victorians he refers to the ‘Fontenelles and Condorcets, with their incomparable éloges, compressing into a few shining pages the manifold existences of men.’ His appreciation of French literary structure and style had been shown before the war in his Landmarks in FrenchLiterature, and it is interesting to note that he revealed in that book, and particularly in the sketch of Voltaire, some of the qualities that were later to attract wide attention in his Eminent Victorians.

Maurois, writing in his native French, breathed the atmosphere in which the style had been perfected. If his works, biographical as well as imaginative, have been mainly about natives of the British Isles (I cannot write ‘Englishmen,’ for was not Disraeli a Jew, Colonel Bramble a Scotchman, and Dr. O’Grady an Irishman?), he has written of them as a Frenchman, with a Frenchman’s brilliance and clarity, a Frenchman’s epigram and paradox.

It is more difficult to account for Ludwig’s conception of biography and his literary style. Nothing could be more different from the traditional German biography than his Goethe, his Napoleon, his Bismarck, and his Wilhelm II. Instead of metaphysical abstractions we have concrete facts; instead of hazy voluminousness we have transparent compactness; instead of clumsy syntactical complications we have precise literary simplicity. What is the explanation? It is, without doubt, that Ludwig, like Maurois and Strachey, has been influenced by the classical moulds of French style. The life of France has always had a special attraction for him. At the age of twenty-four his interest was first concentrated on Napoleon, and from twenty-six onward most of his life has been lived out of Germany and in close spiritual touch with the French historians and essayists of the eighteenth century.

The roots of the new biography, so young, so fresh, and so vital, are to be found embedded in the literature of France of two hundred years ago.