The Biographer and His Victims

I

MY title may not seem inappropriate if we remember that the subject of any biography, except, perhaps, those written for campaign or advertising purposes, is helpless — as helpless as a criminal being led to his execution, and even more so, for a condemned murderer, though his fate is unavoidable, can at least kick and shout, while most heroes of biographies are already dead. The Great Lexicographer had been lying inanimate in Westminster Abbey for over six years before Boswell’s immortal work appeared. He could not protest when Boswell revealed his absurd mannerisms and pictured him as abstractedly withdrawing a slipper from a young lady’s foot. For once Dr. Johnson was silent. If the dead could rise, I suspect that the Sesquipedalian Pachyderm would have burst his cerements in 1791 and stalked forth to haunt and blast the Scotch attorney. But Boswell was safe — safe until, after his own demise, a new group of biographers pounced upon him as their victim, portrayed him as an egotistic and amorous ‘boozer,’ and exposed his indiscretions to a smiling posterity.

Some farsighted persons, like Benjamin Franklin and George Frisbie Hoar, not to mention Colonel Roosevelt and Mr. Coolidge, have attempted to forestall attack by preparing their recollections, or confessions; but even this precaution has not insured them against the future. Even after a statesman, with a disarming candor, has revealed all the blunders which he wishes the world to know, some literary scavenger is likely to prowl through those papers in the attic and expose the one shameless indiscretion which the hero was most anxious to hide. Says one of Oscar Wilde’s inveterate ‘wise-crackers,’ ‘Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.’ This is particularly true of the twentieth century, during which the good old Latin maxim, De mortuis nil nisi bonum, has been relegated to the rubbish pile of outworn phrases. ‘We are overrun,’ continues Wilde’s Gilbert, ‘by a set of people who, when poet or painter passes away, arrive at the house along with an undertaker, and forget that their one duty is to behave as mutes.’

The advent of the professional ‘ debunker ’ has considerably changed the fashion in biography and, by popularizing it, has enormously increased its sales. It is astounding that, in an era when Maurois and Ludwig receive almost as much in royalty checks as Mr. Fletcher or Mr. Oppenheim, no one has opened a School of Biography, like the excellent institutions of Mr. Gallishaw and Dr. Esenwein, which have emitted such an army of shortstory writers. More money can usually be made by telling others how to do a thing than by doing it one’s self. Bond salesmen seldom get rich by investing in the securities which they so warmly recommend; and I have never heard of a croupier’s finding diversion during his vacation by trying his luck at roulette. But perhaps there are two major difficulties: biography may be so simple that anybody can practise it, even without instruction; or it may be so exacting that nobody can teach it. I suspect that it is both. It is easy to do it badly, as scores of amateurs are demonstrating every year; and it is correspondingly hard to do it well, as the paucity of really first-class biographies indicates. Under the circumstances only a supremely audacious man would undertake to prescribe how biography should be written, and even he would be rushing in where more than one angel has feared to tread.

II

The preliminary question, ‘Is biography really a fine art?’ must be answered in the affirmative. It does not, of course, require the originality, the creative power, and the inspiration — to employ a much-abused word — which distinguish the lyric poet, the composer of a symphony, or the painter of a landscape. The biographer rides on shanks’ mare rather than on Pegasus. Neither James Boswell nor Emil Ludwig will be placed by the side of Keats, of Beethoven, or of Corot. There is no biographer in our American Hall of Fame. But biography does, when properly carried on, demand certain qualities which belong, in a less or greater degree, to all the arts — the wise selection of material, its arrangement in accordance with the principles of proportion and climax, and its vivid and attractive presentation. Nor can the biographer function without imagination. It is his business to become acquainted with his hero and the influences which formed his consciousness; to study his physical and mental peculiarities, his habits, his secret dreams and ambitions; to penetrate as far as possible into the recesses of his soul. To accomplish this successfully, the biographer needs discernment and sympathy, but he needs even more the gift to put himself in the place of the man about whom he is writing.

These basic attributes will always be essential to any good biographer. They belonged to Plutarch and Izaak Walton just as much as they do to Mr. Gamaliel Bradford. But the technique and aim of biography have in some respects changed very rapidly in the last thirty years. Biography used to be concerned very largely with a man’s public and official acts, when he was, so to speak, decorated and on exhibition. Then someone rediscovered the disconcerting truth that the ordinary man — and the extraordinary one as well — is, in one respect at least, like an iceberg. Only about one fifth of him is actually visible. The remainder is concealed beneath the surface. So, with modern psychology to aid them, biographers have been trying to find out what flesh and clothes really cover. They are interested still in the Webster of the Seventh of March Speech; but they are fully as much concerned with what happened when the show was over and the orator, tired after the ordeal, took off his blue coat with the brass buttons, untied his thick, heavily starched stock, and settled down in his carpet slippers with his glass of whiskey toddy by his side. Complexes and inhibitions and frustrations have assumed a new significance. The quest of abnormality has been overdone, but in the process George Washington, John Marshall, and Abraham Lincoln are beginning to emerge as genuine human beings, instead of mythical demigods.

George Washington is a typical illustration of this humanization. During his lifetime, he was the centre of bitter controversy. He was denounced scathingly as a President who wanted a crown, as a ‘snob,’ a ‘dictator,’ and a ‘traitor.’ To Knox and Hamilton he seemed very real. Yet after his death, when he was consecrated as the ‘Father of His Country,’ his personality was almost deified. A series of conventional biographies evolved the stately and desiccated figure of tradition, beautifully perpetuated in Greenough’s statue of him in a Roman toga — a statue which was said to have maintained the ‘dignity of history,’ but which is somewhat unlike George Washington, the Virginia planter.

Like most American children in the 1890’s, I was brought up on the cherry-tree episode, and I can distinctly recall being shocked by reading in Henry Cabot Lodge’s delightful Early Memories an anecdote told to him by William Wetmore Story of a gloomy evening after the Battle of the Brandywine when the American Commander in Chief called a council of his officers. In the midst of the discussion, Washington directed one of his staff to cross the river and examine the location of the British forces. Hours passed, while they waited for the important report. Finally the aide stumbled into the tent and, in faltering tones, confessed that the storm had prevented his reaching the opposite shore. Glaring ferociously at him for a moment, Washington seized the heavy leaden inkstand on his desk and hurled it at his subordinate’s head, exclaiming, ‘God damn your soul to Hell, be off with you and send me a man!’ The tale does not make it clear whether or not Washington missed his aim. But there is something Homeric, berserker, about the episode, revealing the tremendous passions veiled by his customary self-control. Nothing, however, in the imposing biographies of Sparks and Marshall and Washington Irving and Everett indicates that the Commander in Chief was capable of such an outburst.

III

It is natural for anyone planning to perpetrate a biography to face the problem, ‘What should I wish posterity to say about me?’ If Mr. Bradford were, in some whimsical mood, to turn his analytic gaze in my direction, what should I like him to notice: that golden Phi Beta Kappa key or that unpaid laundry bill; that ten-dollar check sent to an indigent cousin or that towel pilfered from the Pullman Company; that unprinted ode to spring or that kick furtively bestowed upon a stray cat? Ought not the biographer to obey the Golden Rule? Is not his responsibility grave, dealing, as he does, with another’s reputation, free from the danger of a possible libel suit? Was not Iago right?

But it is precisely these trivialities and peccadillos which, according to modern theories, we should know if we are to reproduce the whole man. The eager credulity with which William Lloyd Garrison swallowed every newly advertised patent nostrum throws light on his mental and moral characteristics. There is much significance in President Roosevelt’s remark to Owen Wister, when, after the latter had been questioning him about, immortality, ‘T. R.’ replied sententiously, ‘One world at a time.’ Dr. Johnson’s casual observation that ‘a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience’ is a sufficient comment on his marital felicity. Benvenuto Cellini in his memoirs tells a succession of prodigious ‘whoppers,’ interspersed, however, with so much gossipy detail that we close the book feeling acquainted with the author; Mr. Coolidge, in his autobiography, deals entirely with the truth, but in such generalities that we are given no clue to the mystery of his personality.

Mr. Franklin MacVeagh related recently a story of William Jennings Bryan, who, at a Fourth of July dinner in London, after speaking with witty extemporization for five minutes, pulled out of his pocket a typewritten manuscript, and, to the disgust of his audience, read a solemn paper on European problems. The guests, expecting entertainment, soon grew resentful. The speech was obviously a failure. Afterward, Mr. MacVeagh saw the ‘Commoner’ all by himself in the hotel corridor, looking vainly for his hat and overcoat. As the two met, Mr. Bryan said plaintively, ‘Mrs. Bryan told me I ought not to do that.’ The anecdote is slight enough; yet the picture of the great orator, neglected and disconsolate, is unforgettable.

IV

What is legitimate material for the biographer? There are, of course, the printed documents, the speeches included in the Congressional Record, the published essays or poems, and often the imposing edition of ‘collected works.’ In these are the hero’s writings as he desired to have them, preserved, corrected, and polished for all time. Here is the man in full dress, hair neatly trimmed, shoes shined, and cravat adjusted. Lincoln is entitled to be judged as a statesman by his debates with Douglas, his Inaugural Addresses, his messages and proclamations. These are his official utterances, as much his as Hamlet is Shakespeare’s or the ‘David’ Michelangelo’s. Contemporary newspapers, also, are of the highest importance, as showing the immediate popular reaction to significant occurrences. No one can deal fairly with any phase of United States history during the period between Grant and Roosevelt without consulting Harper’s Weekly and the Nation.

Then there are the letters, many of them conventional, others expressing informal opinions representing a transitory caprice. Are we entitled to judge a man by a hastily scribbled note, mailed without any idea that it would be preserved? Perhaps not! And yet it is in these intimate communications that a man is most likely to disclose his true self. The letters of Carl Schurz to his wife during the heat of the Lincoln campaign of 1860 show an orator strong in his own conceit. ‘I have had a succession of triumphs,’ he writes, ‘and my exertions have been almost superhuman. . . . All my meetings are crowded, and I drive everything before me.’ This reveals a Carl Schurz quite different from the modest reformer of the 1880’s.

Next come those impetuous acts performed without deliberation, frequently under the stress of jealousy or irritation, but only too often recorded inexorably by some unnoticed chronicler. It would be a boon to biographers if each hero’s wife kept a secret journal, to be deposited in the government archives and published a century after his death. We might then know by 1952 how Webster behaved when the breakfast coffee was brought in cold or what he muttered as he glanced through the monthly bills. Perhaps the reticence of wives on these unromantic topics is the surest demonstration of connubial loyalty. As it is, we have a sufficient store of gossip, of scandalous anecdotes which have traveled in whispers from lip to lip until the original tale has been distorted beyond recognition. Every student of our history becomes familiar with books like Ben: Perley Poore’s Reminiscences, full of fascinating stories but generally untrustworthy. Even the memories of the closest relatives and friends cannot be relied on, but must be ruthlessly checked on dates and details. The experienced biographer soon learns the necessity of authenticating every ‘fact’ which reaches him by word of mouth. From a crowd of witnesses, one contradicting another, he must extract the essential truth, that which testifies to what the man himself was like.

The extant material regarding Henry Cabot Lodge, who was in the public eye for nearly half a century, is enormous in bulk and amazing in variety. Here is folder after folder of letters, many of them in indecipherable longhand, any one of which may hold some memorable phrase or important opinion. Here arc huge scrapbooks of clippings from newspapers, each relating to Lodge’s career. Here are invitations and magazine articles and photographs and telegrams and badges, as well as packages of receipted bills. One portfolio contains over a thousand telegrams of congratulation sent to him following a fisticuff encounter with a pacifist in the lobby of the Capitol. One great box holds nothing but correspondence between Lodge and Henry White; another, the long series of letters between Lodge and Roosevelt. All this must be sorted out, read, and, if necessary, copied. There is far more material on Senator Lodge than there is about Julius Cæsar, Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, and Queen Elizabeth put together.

Do we need it all? Obviously not.

In it is much useless stuff, which will eventually be discarded. But Lodge’s biographer cannot ignore even the smallest scrap of paper. Somewhere in a bundle of unprepossessing documents may repose a page which will change permanently the accepted version of an important event. I once found, tucked away in a pile of worthless circulars, a list of Daniel Webster’s debts in his own handwriting, showing the extent of his obligation to the Bank of the United States. The conscientious biographer must survey all the material, for any acceptable biography must be founded securely on facts.

The building of a book like Beveridge’s Lincoln or Professor Nevins’s Henry White involves long hours of sheer drudgery, occasionally relieved by a thrill at a notable find. Mr. George F. Milton, in preparing his forthcoming life of Stephen A. Douglas, is plodding through thousands of letters which nobody but their recipients has ever read. Before what we call an ‘interpretative’ account of Lincoln, like that by Carl Schurz or Lord Charnwood, could be written, Nicolay and Hay and others had to assemble and evaluate the evidence. Maurois’s diverting Disraeli could not have been done if the preliminary research had not been carried through by Monypenny and Buckle.

As an illustration of the wrong method, I should like to cite Theodore Roosevelt’s life of Thomas H. Benton, included in the American Statesmen Series. On February 7, 1886, Roosevelt, then in New York City, wrote to Lodge, ‘I feel a little appalled over the Benton. I have not the least idea whether I shall make a flat failure of it or not. However, I will do my best and trust to luck for the result.’ On March 27, at his Elkhorn Ranch in Dakota, far from libraries or files of newspapers, he reported, ‘I have written the first chapter of the Benton.’ On May 20, he boasted, ‘I have got the Benton half through.’ Finally, on June 7, he wrote, ‘I have pretty nearly finished Benton, mainly evolving him from my inner consciousness; but when he leaves the Senate in 1850 I have nothing to go by.’

He then appealed to Lodge to hire someone to look up Benton’s career in his declining days. Here are some of the questions: ‘He was elected to Congress; who beat him when he ran the second time? What was the issue? Who beat him, and why, when he ran for Governor of Missouri? And the date of his death? ... As soon as I can get these dates I can send Morse the manuscript.’ Lodge, himself a laborious and scrupulous scholar, cautioned his friend not to be too hasty, but the latter mailed his copy to the general editor, John T. Morse, Jr., on August 9. Roosevelt had written the Benton in rather less than six months, without, apparently, looking up any of the sources. It would be a rash biographer indeed who would dare to adopt a similar procedure in these days when so many Doctors of Philosophy are ready to pounce upon a slip in date or name.

V

All this leads up to a pertinent query — what do we really want to hear about other men and women? We want to know, obviously, what they did, what contribution they made to culture and civilization, what achievements of theirs will be remembered. It is important to the world that Tennyson wrote ‘Ulysses,’ that Grant fought the battle of Shiloh, that Whistler painted the Old Battersea Bridge, that Wagner composed Lohengrin, and that Roosevelt ‘took’ the Panama Canal. All these are matters of record. It is relatively easy for the biographer to portray the artist, the musician, the statesman, in the light of his actual production. Granite and canvas, melody and printed page, do for a time endure, and may be consulted and criticized. To measure Stevenson or Hardy it is essential, first of all, to acquire their novels and study them. Here is what these authors deliberately left behind them as their own.

Leslie Stephen has declared that ‘no person deserves a biography unless he be, in the literal sense, distinguished.’ Personally, however, I am inclined to agree with Carlyle, who, in his Life of John Sterling, said, ‘I have remarked that a true delineation of the smallest man, and his pilgrimage through life, is capable of interesting the greatest man.’ Some of the most entertaining biographies of recent years have been written about such quaint sensationalists as Phineas T. Barnum, John L. Sullivan, Anthony Comstock, and Lydia Pinkham — names which are not likely to shine in any galaxy of immortals. The new Dictionary of American Biography includes not only Anson, the professional baseball player, but also Jesse James, the notorious outlaw. An attractive sinner is better material for biography than a dull saint. But the life of even the most obscure and insignificant wastrel may be made to seem significant by a biographer who understands the convulsive drama of the human soul.

In its higher manifestations, biography is indubitably the revelation of a personality, the effort to do for somebody else what Pepys and Rousseau did unblushingly for themselves. Entrusted with this responsibility, the biographer is no longer a drudge, but a psychoanalyst, a diagnostician, a seer, and a judge. After all, we are made of star dust and grimy earth soil in varying proportions. We can rarely ourselves explain the wild desires, the illogical ambitions, the impossible daydreams and low perversities which sometimes torment us. How, then, could it ever be possible for anyone else to put into words what we really are? For this part of his duty, the biographer must have sensitiveness and discernment and discrimination, the shrewdness to disentangle what a man says from what he thinks, the ability to pierce beneath the protective crust of pride and reserve.

Philip Guedalla has said, ‘The essential thing in biography is to tell the whole truth about your man. That is your only job.’ But again we must ask, with Pilate, ‘ What is truth? ’ What if a specified act be susceptible of two different interpretations, depending on whether you view the perpetrator as a selfish cynic or as a guileless altruist? Often a man’s motives are not clear, even to himself. It is a delicate matter to weigh the good and evil in the career of Charles James Fox or Lord Byron, to say nothing of certain more notorious figures, such as Aaron Burr or ‘Ben’ Butler, who, though far from immaculate to their contemporaries, seem to have had no disturbing sense of sin.

Richard Croker, better known as ‘Boss’ Croker, was generally regarded as a not too scrupulous politician who was for years the evil genius of New York City. But when his widow was in the witness box in Dublin, Ireland, after his death, she took oath as follows: ‘In addition to all the beautiful things that have been testified to about my husband by the previous witness, I have to add this, that my husband was a saint.’

This possibly prejudiced estimate is not that which history will perpetuate; yet it is unquestionably part of the truth, and cannot be altogether ignored.

VI

Perhaps the most contemptible of biographers is he who, from a sense of family pride or an unwillingness to be too severe on his victim, withholds some of the facts. An incident in W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence satirizes this vice. Charles Strickland, the hero — or villain — of that striking novel, abruptly deserted his wife and, fleeing to Paris, became there the painter that he had always longed to be. Later his son William, writing the artist’s biography, said, ‘My father really loved my mother. He once called her an excellent woman.’ Not long after, a pertinacious ‘debunker’ of the German pedant type wrote a thesis on Charles Strickland and caustically reprinted in facsimile the passage from which William Strickland had quoted. Read in its entirety, the paragraph was as follows: ‘God damn my wife. She is an excellent woman. I wish she were in Hell.’

We are harassed, on the other hand, by small-minded purveyors of backstairs gossip, who win a temporary place in the limelight by exposing the foibles and irregularities of the great and the near-great. The muckraker and the ‘debunker’ have both gone to extremes in the twentieth century. Too much attention focused on Webster’s convivial habits leaves one blind to the Reply to Hayne. The story should be told with some sense of proportion. No harm can come, however, from the knowledge that the usually staid Benjamin Franklin did not always obey the aphorisms of Poor Richard, that Abraham Lincoln had his domestic disharmonies, and that Woodrow Wilson’s physical ailments had their effect on American history. Often a trivial anecdote or a casual phrase in a conversation will offer us a glimpse of the real man.

Probably the longest biography of any American is Edward L. Pierce’s life of Charles Sumner, in four huge volumes — an important work, packed with information. It tells us much about the abolitionist statesman. But a great deal also may be deduced from Sumner’s confession that he never assumed in his own library a posture which he would not have taken in the Senate of the United States. General Grant was ordinarily a reticent, uncommunicative person. But one evening, during his quarrel with Sumner over Santo Domingo, he strolled with George F. Hoar past Sumner’s house in Lafayette Square, in Washington, and, looking up at the library windows, clenched his fist and burst out, ‘The man who lives up there has abused me in a way which I have never suffered from any man living.’ Much light is thrown on the character of Blaine by the story of how, in 1876, when he wanted the Republican nomination for President, he once exercised his seductive arts on Carl Schurz and, at the close of an evening walk with him, threw his arm around Schurz’s neck, looked him appealingly in the face, and said, ‘Carl, you won’t oppose me, will you?’ Senator Lodge’s dislike of England and the English, imprinted on his mind in his impressionable early years, undoubtedly had a determining effect upon his political policies. Details of this kind are easily stored in the memory, like Matthew Arnold’s characterization of Thomas Gray in the sentence, ‘He never spoke out,’ or his description of Shelley as a ‘beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.’

The biographer is often tempted, in an endeavor to make his hero a completely consistent character, to pervert or disguise the truth. The writer of prose fiction can, of course, achieve this through his unifying imagination.

Dickens’s Mr. Micawber, Hardy’s Bathsheba Everdene, Mrs. Wharton’s Ethan Frome, and Mr. Lewis’s Babbitt are perfectly rounded conceptions, at the mercy of their creator, who can mould them to his will, transporting them here and there to elucidate or amplify his preconceived theory of their personalities. Real life, however, is less simple. The biographer cannot, if he has a conscience, start with any fixed conception of what his victim is like. If he does form such an hypothesis, the hero, through some waywardness, is sure sooner or later to knock it into a cocked hat. Then comes the test as to whether the biographer is sincerely trying to present a true picture, or whether he is attempting to invade the province of fiction.

Few manifestations of the so-called ‘modern spirit’ are more obnoxious than the ‘fictionized biographies’ with which the book market has recently been inundated. The historical novel at its best, as in Henry Esmond or The Refugees, has entirely justified itself. But the fictionized biography is neither soup nor roast nor pudding, neither fiction nor biography. Except in rare and special instances, like Gertrude Atherton’s The Conqueror, it fails to produce a fair impression of its subject. The author is trying to paint a literary portrait in accordance with his own theories — nicely balanced, smoothly consistent, and entirely harmonious. He insists on pushing his hero along a logical path from the cradle to the grave, without halts or divagations. Life is not like that. The influence of prose fiction on biography has been good in so far as it has taught biographers how to mass material effectively, how to secure dramatic effect, and how to arrange details in accordance with the laws of evolution and climax. But it has done harm by encouraging sensationalism and by fostering the idea that consistency of character must be established where it does not exist.

VII

Biography, then, is an interpretative, selective, and analytic, not a creative art. The biographer’s business is to tell the truth as he sees it, regardless of its implications. It is a mistake for him to interpose his own personality. It may be, as someone has intimated, that every biography of importance is one half at least made up of the biographer, but he must always subordinate himself. His job is done when he has accumulated and assimilated the available facts, arranged them so that they will have coherence, proportion, and symmetry, and allowed the victim to be his own revelator.

Part of a biographer’s equipment is a wise tolerance and impartiality, together with a genuine, although not necessarily a blind, sympathy with his victim. If Woodrow Wilson had written an interpretation of Henry Cabot Lodge, it would probably have had its faults. Although the result might have been entertaining, it is probably just as well that John Tyler did not leave a character sketch of Henry Clay. The ideal biographer should doubtless maintain an attitude of judicial aloofness. But the best biographies, as a matter of fact, have been produced by authors who have been rather enthusiastic about their heroes — books like Boswell’s Johnson, Trevelyan’s Macaulay, Paine’s Mark Twain, and Amy Lowell’s Keats. Masters’s Lincoln, so provocative to sane historians, is an example of how poor a book can be written by an able but wildly prejudiced poet in a field other than his own.

The biographer, no matter how hopeful, will seldom win a unanimity of approval. There are always two points of view, if not more. The Calvin Coolidge of Gamaliel Bradford is plainly not that of Bruce Barton. The picture of Colonel Roosevelt in his Autobiography is quite different from that in Millis’s ironic study of the Spanish War, called The Martial Spirit; indeed the two are almost as far apart as Saint Paul and Mephistopheles. Or consider the attitudes of various schools of political thought toward Thomas Jefferson, whom Roosevelt thought to be a feeble and futile politician.

The weaknesses of contemporary biography are apparent to anyone who does much reading. The recent ‘bull market’ in biographical literature resulted in a natural operation of the economic law of supply and demand, and many books were prepared rapidly for the satisfaction of a greedy public. A score of enterprising journalists with a certain facility in absorbing information and skimming the surface of history were — and are — ready to dash off in a few weeks lives of Horace Greeley or John Randolph or Aaron Burr. Such impatient work is bound to be spotted with errors. Senator Beveridge spent years of research on his monumental Abraham Lincoln, one of the classics of American biography; Emil Ludwig, after a few weeks of travel in the United States, produced a volume under the same title. The difference between the two is not unapparent to those who know anything about the subject.

The influence of such brilliant writers as Lytton Strachey and Philip Guedalla, not to mention Andre Maurois and E. Barrington, has led their imitators to seek for themes which will grip the attention of the public. The impulse to produce a startling book is not, however, in itself a sufficient motive for competing with Mr. Strachey in a field where he is likely to remain supreme. A law-abiding career like that of the late President Eliot of Harvard does, of course, seem a trifle lukewarm after one has spent a few hours in hot water with Jesse James or Old King Brady. No doubt, too, a generation jaded by the ‘movies’ is not to be lured by the outward tameness of the American Statesmen Series and must be stimulated by gorgeous green or yellow bindings, by extravagant ‘blurbs,’ and by the promise of a series of amorous misadventures now revealed for the first time in our annals. Approximately every month the ‘greatest biography of the century’ is launched, only to sink into oblivion before the season closes, Time has its revenge on this ephemeral literature. After all, it was Henry James’s Eliot which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in biography for 1931. Cheap biography is like cheap poetry or cheap furniture — it is soon worn-out and consigned to the ash barrel.

It was inevitable that books prepared so hurriedly should be careless and slipshod in their writing. In their defense, it is maintained that their style is breezy and informal. But biography, more than most forms of literature, should be equipped for permanency. If it is not true, it should never be printed; and if it is true, it should be expressed in a style which will endure. Lockhart’s Scott, Morley’s Voltaire, and Professor Palmer’s Alice Freeman Palmer owe their success to the painstaking care which their authors used. How many ‘masterpieces’ of our prolific contemporary biographers will be in circulation twenty years from now? Hastily composed, hastily set up in type, hastily bound, and hastily dumped into the bookstores, they must be sold in a few weeks if they are to be sold at all. The fact that only a few of them have indexes shows that they are intended to be merely the pastime of an idle hour.

VIII

So much for one phase of the picture. On the other hand, modern biography is not without its triumphs. Competent biographers were probably never more numerous than they are in 1931; and they have often in a quiet way rehabilitated personages who, in their own time, were much misunderstood. Take, for illustration, the case of Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor as President of the United States. For nearly fifty years he was depicted by prejudiced Northern historians as a drunkard and a vulgarian, an obstructionist and a traitor. And then, within a very brief period, at least five books on Johnson were published, each one prompted by sympathy and a sincere desire to show what the ‘Tailor President’ was really like. As a result of this extensive research by Judge Winston, Claude G. Bowers, George F. Milton, and others, we now conceive of ‘Andy’ Johnson as a rugged, industrious, well-intentioned statesman, crude in his manners, perhaps, but trying earnestly to ascertain and do the right thing, and undertaking, in defiance of a bold and unscrupulous Congressional clique, to carry out Lincoln’s policies on Reconstruction. Once thought to be the villain of the post-war era, he now emerges as the hero, encompassed by the sinister forms of Thaddeus Stevens, ‘Ben’ Butler, and ‘Ben’ Wade. Because of this new and correct interpretation, history has had to be rewritten.

In another respect also strides have been made. The old authorized or subsidized biography, frequently entitled ‘The Life and Times of George F. Blank,’ is now looked upon with distrust. We all know what it was like. Usually written by a relative, it adhered to the spirit of a sentence in a recent book, reading as follows: ‘The writer of this memorial has not thought it necessary to call attention to defects in the character she has sought to portray.’ A conspicuous example is Hallam Tennyson’s life of his father, in which the Victorian Bard stands out like his own King Arthur—flawless and uninteresting. After reading it, I turned with delight to the remark of the iconoclastic Swinburne: ‘Mr. Tennyson, we understand, of course, that Queen Victoria is Guinevere and that the Prince Consort is King Arthur; but would you mind telling me who is Lancelot?’ In the field of American political biography, there are many such undiluted eulogies, and they are all untrustworthy.

The best of the modern biographies arc less solemn, less rhetorical, less packed with platitudes and didacticism, than similar books would have been half a century ago. The work of Mr. Lytton Strachcy struck a new note in biographical literature. Fortunately for his method, earlier scholars had smoothed his way by gathering facts regarding certain picturesque and rather vulnerable people. With this material before him, he applied to it an appreciation of the significance of details and an instinct for dramatic values, tinting it always with the hues of a consummate irony — an irony sometimes too vividly colored, but more often so subtly employed that it escapes dull eyes. The gift of irony is, of course, a constant temptation to its possessor to wander from the truth in the quest of some miracle of wit. For my part, however, I would far rather have Strachey’s caustic sketch of Thomas Arnold than Stanley’s reverential two-volume panegyric of the Headmaster of Rugby — and Strachey is probably nearer the truth.

The same intellectual distinction attaches to Philip Guedalla, although one occasionally wearies of his ostentatiously brilliant phrasing in which a mot juste, like ‘vague,’ is repeated too often. His manner, the glitter of which may be tinsel as well as gold, is admirably fitted in his book, The Second Empire, to a subject like Napoleon III, but is less successful with Lord Palmerston, a more substantial and less scintillating figure. Mr. Hilaire Belloc is another of the modernists who worship at the shrine of Cleverness. These three men have transformed biography by making it less cumbersome, less dully formidable, and thus emphasizing its possibilities for entertainment as well as instruction.

IX

Our own period has been notably rich in biography and autobiography. The pedagogically-minded still hark back to the classics— to Plutarch and Boswell and Lockhart. It is still difficult to surpass such ‘purple patches’ as Boswell’s introduction to the Great Lexicographer in the shop of the bookseller, Davies, or the description of the meeting at dinner of Johnson, the Tory, and John Wilkes, the Radical. But there are books in our day which are not sufficiently praised. Among the autobiographies, Gosse’s Father and Son and Hudson’s Far Away and Long Ago must be placed with the masterpieces of the past. As for biographies, such works as Croly’s Hanna, — an amazingly fair estimate of a Conservative by a Liberal, — Beer’s Stephen Crane, Paine’s Mark Twain, Beveridge’s Lincoln, and Strachey’s Queen Victoria, are, if we can forget their suspicious reccntness, far better than, let us say, Southey’s Nelson.

We have a group of authors in the United States to-day, including M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Allan Nevins, Gamaliel Bradford, Albert Bigelow Paine, George F. Milton, Claude G. Bowers, Samuel E. Morison, Ray Stannard Baker, and several others, any one of whom can be counted upon to produce a distinguished biography. James Ford Rhodes was in no sense a romantic personage, but a sedentary historian, who spent most of his waking hours among his books. Yet Mr. Howe has skillfully made him the protagonist of a not unexciting drama. Mr. Nevins’s Henry White moves along so gracefully that we forget how difficult to write such easy reading is. Mr. Bowers, by his extensive use of newspaper files, has shown their high value as source material. All these men have breadth of knowledge, devotion to research, fair-mindedness, and a passion for truth. Their literary and historical consciences have not atrophied.

The question is often asked by youngsters, ‘Where can I find a subject for biography? All the claims seem to be staked out.’ The answer is that there is always room for a new good book. Although there are long lives of John C. Calhoun and Ulysses S. Grant, no one has yet said the final word on these men. Nobody has yet explained how a person so unmagnetic as Benjamin Harrison could be elected President of the United States. The raw

stuff of biography is all around us. Think of the opportunity for a Strachey-like treatment of the pompous Roscoe Conkling; or for an account of Theodore Roosevelt in the manner of Philip Guedalla!

There is no danger that biography will become unfashionable. So long as humanity is dominated by forcefulness or led by charm, so long as Mussolinis and Lenins fascinate us by their personalities, so long will there be a demand for the stories of their lives. Biography, furthermore, will continue to be one of the leisurely arts, requiring investigation, meditation, and revision. In prose fiction, enthusiasm and intensity may conceal many crudities, but biography cannot be scribbled off in a few hours, like an account of a professional hockey match. Finally, it is well to remember that there will always be charlatans and sensationalists in every branch of literature. When we are troubled by them, as we occasionally must be, — especially if we have to review their books, — it is consoling to know that we still have honest craftsmen, who uphold their ideals and are not likely to abandon them.