Literary Biographies

WHEN biographers invade literature they face a quandary. To pursue a genius it is necessary to know not Only his temperament but the purport of what he has written. This calls for a critical resourcefulness not readily possessed.

’BIOGRAPHY,’said Sir Walter Scott, ’the most interesting perhaps of every species of composition, loses all its interest with me when the shades and lights of the principal character are not accurately and faithfully detailed.’ On the evidence of this remark, Scott might not have been greatly interested in Arthur Weigall’s Sappho of Lesbos, Her Life and Times (Stokes, $3.00). We possess about one twentieth of her works, in a very fragmentary condition: there are a good many references to her, of dubious authenticity, in later classical writers; we know approximately when and where she lived, that she was married and had a daughter, that she loved widely and too well, and that she wrote with exquisite clarity and passion. On the basis of these facts, without discriminating very much as to the reliability of his sources, Mr. Weigall has written some three hundred pages. Naturally there is more about Sappho’s ’times’ than about her ’life’, and we get a bird’s-eye view of Ægean politics and personalities in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. which is pretty well put together and clearly enough expressed. Mr. Weigall writes for the reader who knows nothing about the subject beforehand, and scholars will probably disagree with several of his conclusions. Though it generates little of my enthusiasm, the book is done in a workmanlike manner, and is easy to read.

Andre Maurois’s talent is well suited to a life of Voltaire (Appleton, $2.00) and he has treated the subject with his usual deft vivacity. He has selected the most vivid episodes, he has told them with brevity and point, and there is not a dull page in the book. He has all the writer s social graces; his way of writing is to first-class literature what good manners are to society; one is pleased by the adroitness of the gesture and the charming smile, and the whole thing is so accomplished that it seems boorish to ask for anything else.

Yet, unfairly perhaps, one does ask for something else, just as, outside of literature, one asks for more than good manners. If one compares M. Maurois with a writer so apparently like him as Lytton Strachey, a difference in dimension becomes clear. Strachey, in Hooks and Characiers, also wrote about Vollaire, but Straehey wrote from a definite angle which, no matter how superficial or unsympathetic it may seem to the reader, gives a tone lo his writing which that of Maurois lacks. One feels in reading Strachey that he is expressing a part of himself, that his view of Voltaire is, implicitly, a part of his view of life, and the result is consequently more rich and more dramatic than what is achieved by M. Maurois. Strachey could be a good critic of literature, as his essay on Racine shows, but M. Maurois, when he moves outside of his light and graceful circle, is apt to flounder, and it was a wise recognition of his own limitations when, in writing his life of Shelley, he practically omitted all reference to the fact that Shelley was a poet. In the present little work he is much happier when he describes what Voltaire did than when he tries to evaluate his philosophy or his writings.

John Buchan’s life of Sir Walter Scott (CowardMcCann, $3.75) is a solid and satisfactory performance, and a comparison of it with Lockhart’s great work only increases one’s respect for the way in which Mr. Buchan has included, in so short a space, nearly everything that illuminates his subject. It is no easy thing to write a life of Scott as a writer, because writing seems, in his case, to have been so little inevitable to his personality. He respected men of action far more than contemplative men (the Duke of Wellington was the only man who awed him), he was admired more, by discriminating people, for his common sense than his genius, and he was extraordinarily uncritical of the value of what he wrote. ’It is a singular fact,’says Lockhart, ‘that before the public, or rather the booksellers, had given their decision, he no more knew whether he had written well or ill, than whether a die thrown out of a box was to turn up a size or an ace.’ He lacked nearly all the characteristics which we, romantically and often falsely, associate with genius, for he conformed without question to the social standards of his time, he was magnanimous to his literary rivals, his temperament was equable, and he exercised a strong control over his emotions. Nor does his writing seem to come from the whole man, in spite of his great gifts. His poetry, with one or two magical exceptions, is never entirely smelted from the ore, and I cannot think of any one character in the novels, though Mr. Buchan would violently disagree with me, who has a fully spontaneous life of his own.

But it is a proof of Scott’s rank as a writer that one judges him by the highest standards, and it is a proof of his lovableness as a man that, with the exception, probably, of Shakespeare, he would have been the most agreeable of all great British writers to have known. Yet, from the biographer’s point of view, one can know him, at most periods of his life, only externally; like one of his own characters, it is hard to get a three-dimensional view of him. In his novels he did not care to describe mental processes,— speech and action were what interested him, — and Scott’s own speech and action form the chief materials for his biographer. It is only for the Inter period of his life that we have that admirable journal to give us some glimpse of what went on inside. Lockhart, in a revealing image, describes Scott’s conversation, and incidentally his character, when he says: ‘The strongest, and least observed of all lights is . . . daylight, and his talk was commonplace, just as sunshine is, which gilds the most indifferent objects, and adds brilliancy to the brightest.’ Of this character and career, so difficult to describe because of their apparent obviousness, Mr. Buchan has gixen a competent and convincing picture; his critical remarks on Scott’s writings are usually interesting and just.

Nothing could be less like the life of Scott than the life of the Brontës. Scott shone successfully in a world that would have been much the same without him; the world of the Brontës was entirely their own. E. F. Henson, in describing it. has quite rightly concentrated on Charlotte Brontë (Longmans, Green, $4.00), for though the whole family fascinates us, and must be described, we know much more about her than any of the others: she revealed herself, in her letters and her novels, more completely, and she lived long enough for people to take an interest in her while she was still alive. Of these people the most important, of course, was Mrs. Gaskell, and her life of Charlotte is, in all respects but one, one of the finest of English biographies. Her picture of the whole family is unforgettable, and, in its essentials, true. But she let her prejudices run away with her: among other things, she unfortunately exaggerated the peculiarities of old Mr. Brontë and she entirely concealed the chief emotional experience in the life of her heroine. Our present picture of the 15routes is probably closer to the facts.

Mr. Benson’s book is a good one. ‘The shades and lights of the principal character are accurately and faithfully detailed,’and the many problems — Branwell’s affair with Mrs. Robinson, his share in Wuthering Heights, and so forth — are handled carefully, so that we accept Mr. Benson’s conclusions as being the most plausible of any that can be suggested. His book makes absorbing reading, though it will not displace Mrs. Gaskell’s, in spite of Mrs. Gaskell’s shortcomings. Mrs. Gaskell has more intensity, she makes us more intimately aware of her subject than Mr. Benson does. Yet Mr. Benson’s book should be widely read, for hardly anywhere else is there to be found in real life a tragedy like that of the Brontës, which contains so fully the Aristotelian emotions of pity and terror, and which can make us wiser and more alive by expanding our realization of the human capacity for suffering and nobility. The story should be told to each generation, and for ours Mr. Benson has told it better than anybody else.

THEODORE SPENCER