Debunkery and Biography

THE contemporary records of any actions and lives, partly through envy and ill-will, partly through favor and flattery, pervert and distort truth. - PLUTARCH

I

THE Jazz Age — that fascinating, feverish, half-mad decade of the 1920’s which left us all fatigued and a trifle bewildered — had its sordid aspects both in manners and in literature; but it did deal a deathblow to the rhapsodical, or sentimental, type of biography. The modernists have not invented any mysterious new biographical technique. Such masterpieces as Boswell’s Johnson in the eighteenth century and Froude’s Carlyle in the nineteenth have not yet been superseded, and may be studied with profit even by our complacent generation. But, a few exceptions aside, the prevailing fault of biography up to the World War was an unwillingness to expose any deceit or indiscretion in the immaculate hero.

Dr. Samuel Johnson, with his unfailing common sense, declared, ‘We have had too many honeysuckle lives of Milton,’ and then proceeded rather clumsily to overturn the author of Paradise Lost from his pedestal. Johnson’s iconoclasm, however, was due rather to his Tory prejudice than to a passion for the truth. One hundred and forty years afterward the late Lytton Strachey spoke disdainfully of Victorian biographies, ‘with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design,’ and pointed out that it is ‘ perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one.’ This indictment may have been too severe, but it was badly needed. Strachey himself, not satisfied with merely playing the rôle of censor, was ready to indicate by his own example how biography ought to be written. Because he practised what he preached, the spirit of biography is different to-day from what it was in 1875.

Autobiography, naturally enough, has always been colored by the desire of its author to be rightly understood. The autobiographer has, to quote Leslie Stephen, ‘an irresistible desire for confidential expansion,’ and his excuse, naturally enough, is to furnish posterity with a first-hand record of the truth.

But even truth may have its blurred outlines and apparent contradictions. It may be taken for granted that no man — not even the egocentric Benvenuto Cellini or the garrulous Jean Jacques Rousseau — ever told quite all about himself. Henry Adams, in his incomparable Education, omitted to mention his wife, the lovely lady in whose memory Saint Gaudens designed the noble statue in Rock Creek Cemetery. The shameless Samuel Pepys did not, we may be sure, disclose all his amours, nor did Thomas Collier Platt reveal all his backstairs conspiracies.

Even after the great man has sorted out his papers, eliminated his imprudent letters, and printed his confessions, the biographer must make a reexamination and form his own perhaps less palatable but certainly less partisan conclusions.

II

It would be pleasant to think that biography, as contrasted with autobiography, is always trustworthy. Unfortunately, however, it, too, involves the fickle human equation. The examination of the emotional reactions of men is captivating, but it is not like dividing twelve by three or measuring the base of the Great Pyramid. Probably no presidential nominee was ever wholly pleased with his campaign biography, no matter how eulogistic. Theodore Roosevelt once said to William Roscoe Thayer, ‘How strange motives are! When you did a certain thing, you thought that a single, clear reason determined you, but on looking back you see instead a dozen mixed motives, which you did not suspect at the time.’ No attempt to peer into the secret recesses of the human soul ever quite fulfilled the optimistic expectations of the victim.

Nevertheless, whenever the aims of biography have been seriously discussed in our time, it has been generally, though not unanimously, agreed that its primary aim should be to tell the truth, ‘dispassionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions.’ Joaquin Miller, in a tolerant mood, once wrote: —

Such an attitude, although doubtless to be commended for its Christian charity, would, if persisted in, turn biography into a faded and inconsequential art. Far more intelligent is Voltaire’s aphorism: ‘We owe consideration to the living; to the dead we owe truth only.’ It is the biographer’s business, after modestly admitting his fallibility, to balance debits and credits, and produce an audit of achievement and character. If he evades this duty, his work should not be taken seriously.

The biographer ought not, however, to be a photographer, but rather a portrait painter, whose theories and philosophies tinge what he writes. It is astounding what different authors with conflicting points of view will accomplish with approximately the same material. A conspicuous instance is that of Abraham Lincoln. Some months ago, two loudly heralded and extensively advertised lives of him came on the market. Examining the two works, a foreigner unacquainted with Lincoln would hardly suspect that they were about the same person. One author conceives of Lincoln as dominated by unworthy motives, perverted by hatred of the South, and largely responsible for both the crimes of the Republican Party and our present industrial maladies. The other regards him as a haloed saint, incapable of even an error in judgment, and ordained, like Moses, by the Almighty to guide his people through a perilous national crisis. It is difficult to determine which book is less harmful. After turning their pages, one reverts with relief and comfort to Beveridge’s searching biography, through which Lincoln moves, a very human person, growing steadily out of awkwardness, perplexity, and irresolution into splendid leadership.

It is probable that a reaction toward realism was bound to follow in the wake of the World War. Of that reaction, Lytton Strachey was the high priest and dominant leader. His imitators, rejoicing in the name of ‘debunkers,’ inundated the market with ironic and fictionized and sensational lives of the great and the near-great, putting out books of a kind of which Strachey would have been ashamed. A mass of ephemeral biography appeared and vanished almost with the next morning’s sun. But, with all its excesses, this spontaneous impulse toward realism had a tonic effect, and biography, like a man after a daring adventure or a wild night, has settled down to take stock after its experience

III

It may clarify this attempt at criticism if we ask ourselves what, if anything, the art of biography has gained as a result of this outburst. It is doubtful whether any new device has been discovered; but the modern biographer has altered the stress, and in so doing has made his work seem quite different. Now and then belated samples of the old style in biography are published, but they seem as out of date as Italian primitives in the age of Raphael and as unsophisticated as a Vermont farmer in Greenwich Village. Occasionally, too, certain biographies of the nineteenth century, or even earlier, display characteristics which mark them as prophetic of a less artless period. But if we go by averages and speak in generalizations, the trend of biography today is much altered from that of half a century ago — as is the trend in poetry and prose fiction. The effort to suggest what the change really is may involve the use of half truths and shadowy claims. I am sure, however, that such a transformation has occurred, even though I may not be able to prove it to everybody’s satisfaction.

‘Human life,’ once said John Addington Symonds, ‘ is not to be measured by what men perform, but by what they are.’ Few will challenge the statement that contemporary biography is laying its emphasis less on deeds, such as battles and coronations and political campaigns, and more on thoughts and emotions. Although the two can seldom be completely disentangled, personality is considered more significant than achievement.

Three books published shortly after the World War — all by Europeans and each in a different language — were forerunners of this movement: Strachey’s Queen Victoria in 1921, André Maurois’s Ariel in 1924, and Emil Ludwig’s Napoleon in 1926. Each was much discussed and widely popular, and the triad constitute the gospel of the modern school of biography. If one will compare them only superficially with Sidney Lee’s Queen Victoria of 1902, with Dowden’s Shelley of 1886, and with Fournier’s Napoleon the First of 1903, the discrepancy between yesterday and to-day will seem very striking. Another illuminating contrast might be made between Morley’s Gladstone, a fine book of its type, and Pringle’s Roosevelt, the best political biography in the United States during 1931. Morley was concerned principally with what Gladstone did. Pringle tried to disclose what Roosevelt was. Compared with Pringle’s book, Morley’s two volumes seem stilted and formal, and even dull.

In logical elaboration of their theory, these modern biographers have been giving space to matters formerly considered trifling, but which do reveal personality. In this respect they have reverted to Boswell, whose Samuel Johnson was welcomed so enthusiastically by the critical world of the 1790’s mainly because of its ineffaceable picture of the great Tory in dressing gown and slippers, with his wig scorched and awry. Readers who were shown the Lexicographer pocketing worthless strips of orange peel or crying ecstatically, ‘Who’s for punch?’ felt as if they had been introduced to him and had shaken him by the hand. A majority of us, deep in our hearts, want to hear about a genius’s habits — what he ate and smoked and drank, what kinds of games he preferred, what shade of cravats he favored, at what hour he usually went to bed. We are interested also in his physical attributes — whether he was fat or thin, hirsute or glabrous, nervous or sluggish. An investigation would probably show that most readers of biographies turn first, not to the preliminary chapter on genealogical details, but to those sections which tell what the hero was like. In biography, gossip is almost a virtue.

Consider, for example, such an apparently unromantic theme as disease. It rarely occurs to us that captains and potentates ever wake up with headaches like ordinary mortals, or swallow drugs to alleviate rheumatic twinges. Yet often a faltering in a crisis can be explained by a digestive upset or even by a poor night’s sleep. We have learned recently that the whole course of English history may have been altered by Queen Elizabeth’s physical limitations, and that a battle may have been lost because Napoleon’s stomach misbehaved before Waterloo.

White House physicians, if relieved from the Oath of Hippocrates, could disclose some startling secrets and solve more than one mystery. Not until years later did the American public learn of the throat operation on President Grover Cleveland performed by Dr. Keen on board a yacht during the summer of 1893, at a moment when the stock market had collapsed and a financial panic was threatened. The full consequences of President Woodrow Wilson’s breakdown in 1919 and of his months of helplessness in Washington have not yet been revealed.

There are many questions still to be answered. What ailment forced Shakespeare to retire from the dramatic world and go back to Stratford to die at the early age of fifty-two? What was the full effect of tuberculosis on John Keats and Robert Louis Stevenson? In biography the breaking of an arm may be as significant as the fall of a cabinet. Of this fact, Strachey, Maurois, and Ludwig were not ignorant. They satisfied a popular craving, focused our attention on personality, and sold their books by thousands.

IV

In his passion for probing into personality, the modern biographer, aided by the laboratory and the clinic, has made one contribution of more than temporary importance. Even the excellent Boswell was content to reproduce faithfully Johnson’s actual words without trying to fathom his thoughts. He regarded himself obviously as a reporter, not as a psychologist or diagnostician. But our really modern biographers, with science to sustain them, have familiarized themselves with neuroses and inhibitions, and have peered behind speeches and printed pages into the subconscious mind.

Autobiographers have become introspective and published the results of their researches. W. H. Hudson, in his Far Away and Long Ago, has told us something of the animism of his childhood, and Edmund Gosse, in his fascinating Father and Son, has lifted the veil from the inevitable antagonism between two generations. So Freud, from whose fantastic brain have emanated so much of good and so much of evil, has attributed the peculiar qualities and conduct of Leonardo da Vinci to a remarkable ‘mother fixation’ which dominated his artistic life. Recent writers have explained the riddles of Thomas Carlyle and Edgar Allan Poe by a theory of sex deficiency. When we observe what these analysts have been able to concoct with almost no testimony available, we cannot help wondering what fantasies would be created if we were the victims.

Sometimes, as in the case of Amy Lowell’s Keats, this analytic method has achieved brilliant results. It has been less successful with the lyric and erotic Robert Burns. Certain difficulties are inherent in this kind of study. It is seldom practicable to isolate a genius in his own library and test his reactions. We cannot recall Poe from his tomb in a Baltimore cemetery and subject him to physical and psychological examinations. The evidence at our disposal is elusive, dubious, and often contradictory. Carlyle, presumably acquainted with his own deficiencies and potencies, would probably, if resurrected, smile sardonically at recent explanations of his eccentricities. On the other hand, the psychographer enjoys a decisive advantage in that he cannot readily be refuted. He can weave his subtle hypotheses, safe in the confidence that the dead do not rise.

The modern biographer conscientiously practising his profession conceives of himself as uniting the functions of anatomist, diagnostician, cross-examiner, detective, spy, alienist, and judge. He knows very well that he cannot neglect even a whisper. While occupied in his researches, he must spend his waking hours in dissecting the complicated motives which drive a fanatic to immolation for an impossible ideal, or seduce a sensualist into risking his reputation for the gratification of a fleeting desire. His task is fraught, with peculiar dangers. If a biographer is obsessed by a theory, he may be tempted to pervert the facts in order to justify his system. If he is not alert and susceptible, he may miss the clue when it is before his eyes. And then, when all the witnesses have been summoned and all the documents scanned, there still remains the baffling mystery of the human soul. If we cannot even understand ourselves, how can we understand people long dead and unable to speak in their own behalf?

Yet, with all these reservations, I am sure that the chief contribution made in recent years to the art of biography is the application of psychology to the interpretation of personality. The author in the United States who has done this most successfully is probably the late Gamaliel Bradford — a patient and sensitive student, dwelling apart from crowds and pavements, but quick to discern human impulses and unbiased in his judgments. His psychographs, though overpraised by some New England critics, are sound in their craftsmanship and their conclusions.

V

Modern biography, then, has rightly insisted on the importance of personality. In the second place, as has already been intimated, it has become definitely realistic, as if in revolt against the fulsome eulogy and saccharine sentimentality of an earlier day. Once no self-respecting biographer felt that he had done his duty unless he had discovered in his hero’s boyhood pranks the promise of future grandeur and had evoked some superannuated pedagogue who could remember having said oracularly, ‘My lad, you will become President.’ The axiom that the dead were immune from criticism was tacitly accepted as orthodox, and no one sought to draw their frailties ‘from their dread abode.’ Nobody’s feelings were injured, and biography remained tame, innocuous, and untruthful, as flat as distilled water and as insipid as an invalid’s custard.

Under Victoria, satire at the expense of the priggish ‘Arnold of Rugby’ would have been condemned as sacrilege. The Good Queen would not have been amused, and Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s School Days, would have risen in his wrath to smite the offender. Neither could have dreamed that a day would come when an Englishman would venture to poke fun, not only at the respectable Dr. Arnold, but even at the monarch herself.

Lytton Strachey was not the earliest biographer to employ irony as a legitimate literary device; but his skill and cleverness brought him prompt recognition from a generation which rejoiced at smartness, irreverence, and cynicism. It was his function to revive the popular interest in biography by making it more attractive. Caustic though he was in Eminent Victorians, he was something more than a mere destroyer of reputations. He was a first-class artist, with a wit which excused, even justified, his iconoclasm. His severity of judgment often sprang from his intense hatred of sham, and his estimates of men and women are, in most cases, those which posterity will ultimately accept.

But, as so often happens, lesser authors followed in his train, adopting his methods without possessing his talent. They sought deliberately for idols with feet of clay, and rejoiced greatly when they found a skeleton in a king’s closet. If they had had their way, we should have no heroes left. They called themselves ‘debunkers,’ and boasted that they were rectifying history.

The debunkers have notified us, in a sensational manner, that General Grant was once a ne’er-do-well, and that Henry Ward Beecher succumbed to unclerical desires; but they have taught us little that was new. While they were in their prime, any scribbler could gain a cheap notoriety by portraying Charles James Fox or Daniel Webster as a drunkard. More recently, however, readers have been remembering that Fox and Webster were also statesmen, and that what they achieved in Parliament and Congress is far more important to the world than what they imbibed in their convivial moments. The debunkers performed a service by teaching us to laugh at sham and pomposity, and the art of biography has perhaps profited by their example. But a sincere biographer would rather see a debunker than be one.

The debunkers have not altogether vanished. Human scavengers will always gather where there is money to be made by calumny. The Great Depression, however, narrowed the market for scandal literature, and many of its purveyors are temporarily among the unemployed, or have been taken over by the tabloids. There are still fields in which they might be usefully occupied.

Consider, for example, the case of Roscoe Conkling. Although he has been in some degree overshadowed by his political contemporaries, he was once a powerful ‘boss’ in New York State and enjoyed in Oneida County a local celebrity as Utica’s favorite son. I never saw him, but through the newspapers I grew familiar as a boy with his stalwart, broad-chested frame, attired in the height of sartorial elegance, his curled side whiskers, and his blond hair running picturesquely down into a sharp point at the very middle of his high forehead. Henry Adams classed him among what he called ‘ stage exaggerations.’ He died as he had lived, dramatically, from overexertion during the Great Blizzard of March 1888. When he was buried, there was mourning among his Republican disciples.

The only extant life of Roscoe Conkling, prepared by the pious pen of a nephew, is a perfect demonstration of what biography should not be. Here and there is a detail which arrests the attention, such as the fact that Roscoe’s immigrant ancestor was named Ananias — an item upon which a debunker would seize with noisy avidity. But the book is without form or systematic arrangement — an assembly of miscellaneous data, with no thread, either logical or chronological, to hold them together; and Conkling moves through the lifeless pages like a tailor’s dummy, expressionless and unconvincing, pushed hither and thither at the caprice of the author.

Some day a lover of history with a sense of literary values will reproduce Roscoe Conkling as he was, with all his inflated self-sufficiency, his florid rhetoric, his vanity, his irresistible vitality, and his magnetism. He will then stand out in the majesty of his Herculean torso and thunderous voice, a consummate actor, acquainted with all the jugglery and tinsel of that political stage on which he played his part. Told in this fashion, his life will have the thrill of a Greek tragedy, in which the doomed protagonist cannot avoid his fate; and the story will move its readers with pity and with terror. When that volume is published, Senator Conkling will indeed live again.

VI

In the third place, the modern biographer has been making a conscious effort to select and arrange his material with regard, not only to proportion and emphasis, but also to vividness. Encompassed as he usually is by a long accumulation of unassorted items, he must evaluate them and bring harmony out of confusion. In preparing his admirable life of Woodrow Wilson, Mr. Ray Stannard Baker has been obliged to scan over four hundred thousand separate documents, and to choose from them the really significant details. Even a book containing nothing but the truth may lack animation unless the writer understands the basic principles of organization. Anyone who habitually reads contemporary biographies must have observed how many of them open in a manner to grip the attention and perhaps to supply a motif for what is to follow.

Strachey’s Queen Victoria, for example, begins with a dramatic account of the death in childbirth of Princess Charlotte of England — an incident chosen by the author for its intensity as well as for its introduction of the young physician who later became the influential Baron Stockmar. Maurois’s Ariel starts with a few bitter paragraphs on Dr. Keate, the flogging headmaster of Eton, who tried in his school to turn out ‘ hard-faced men, all run in the same mould,’ and who symbolized the system against which Percy Bysshe Shelley was to rebel. Ludwig’s Napoleon shows us in its opening pages a picture of the Corsican wife, Letizia, greeting her husband on his return from the wars, and thus suggests that Bonaparte’s mother, not he, is the central figure of the mighty drama. Much may be learned about the technique of biography by examining the introductory paragraphs of Lockhart’s Scott or Trevelyan’s Macaulay — both excellent books of a past generation — and then turning to Pringle’s Roosevelt.

It is natural that a biographer with a sense of the dramatic should be constantly in search of incidents which appeal to a jaded public. Who knows when or how the course of a career may be suddenly shifted?

Let us revert in our imaginations to an evening in August 1884. The stage setting is the broad verandah of a summer home perched on the rocky point where the tiny peninsula of Nahant juts farthest into the Atlantic, a few miles north of Boston. It is the house of Henry Cabot Lodge, a young Harvard graduate with reforming tendencies, just beginning to make a stir in Massachusetts politics, and, at the time, chairman of the Republican state committee. To the disgust of many Republicans, including Lodge himself, James G. Blaine had been nominated only a few weeks before as his party candidate for the presidency; and, when Grover Cleveland had been later named by the Democrats, a number of influential independents, including Carl Schurz, George William Curtis, and Charles William Eliot, had come out openly for him, thus precipitating what became the ‘Mugwump’ movement. Young Theodore Roosevelt, like the older Lodge, had been a delegate to the Republican convention, where they had both unsuccessfully supported George F. Edmunds. After the nomination of the obnoxious Blaine, Roosevelt, had retired to his Dakota ranch, disgruntled and perplexed.

Meanwhile Lodge, for reasons satisfactory to himself, had decided to remain orthodox. In midsummer Roosevelt, still in a quandary, journeyed east and was, of course, invited to Nahant. There, on an August evening with no reporter to listen, the two future leaders of the nation sat talking over the situation. What was said, what arguments were advanced, no one will ever know. A day or two afterward, however, the Boston Herald published an authorized interview in which Roosevelt said, ’I intend to vote the Republican presidential ticket.’ Later he came east again and spoke on the stump both for Lodge, who was running for Congress, and for Blaine. Both Blaine and Lodge were defeated. If Roosevelt had stood out for Cleveland instead of for Blaine, — as, with their political antecedents, both he and Lodge might well have done, — history might then and there have been altered. One is reminded of Robert Frost’s lines: —

VII

In the fourth place, biography has recently immensely extended its range. Izaak Walton, with pious rhetoric, announced that his Lives were to be ‘an honour to the virtuous dead, and a lesson in magnanimity to those who shall succeed them.’ Sir Sidney Lee, many years later, maintained that biography ought to deal with ‘a career serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude.’ But the day has gone by when only the noble and the saintly were regarded as worth reading about.

The other day I opened a volume of our new and comprehensive Dictionary of American Biography to glance at the sketch of William Colgate, the benefactor of Colgate University. As I finished the article, I casually scanned the next few pages to learn what other figures among the C’s were considered worthy of commemoration. In close proximity to Colgate were the following varied personages: Chang and Eng, the ‘Siamese Twins’; John Chapman, known locally throughout the West as ‘Johnny Appleseed’; John G. Clarkson, the famous baseball pitcher; John E. Clough, an estimable Baptist missionary; George Coggeshall, a sea captain; Thomas Coke, a Methodist bishop; Frank Nelson Cole, a mathematician; and John H. Converse, a locomotive builder. Here was a diverse group of defunct celebrities, each with his own peculiar distinction, and each interesting in his individual way.

Among the subjects of full-length biographies during the past decade have been Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr, Pauline Bonaparte and Jesse James, John L. Sullivan, Richard Croker, and Anthony Comstock, to say nothing of various rogues, vagabonds, and charlatans. Even the conservative Gamaliel Bradford devoted one volume of his ‘ psychographs ’ to Damaged Souls and another to Wives. The professional biographer, no longer restricting himself to the righteous, is on the watch constantly for people who will not be dull. I once received for review on the same afternoon a biography of Captain Robert F. Scott, the intrepid Antarctic explorer, and a volume on Lydia Pinkham. The gap between these somewhat different benefactors of mankind represents fairly the scope of biography in our times.

This unprecedented extension of the legitimate field of biography has been accompanied by a tendency toward ease and informality of style, often quite agreeable, although sometimes so undignified as to be cheap. The now almost obsolete Life and Times of George F. Blank, in two quarto volumes, was usually heavy and repelling. It was unquestionably thorough, even authoritative, but was seldom read for pleasure on a winter’s evening before the fire. Indeed, once on the market, it was rarely read at all. Recently I consulted in the Boston Athenæum a copy of a life of Robert Rantoul, Jr., the Massachusetts statesman, which had not been taken out since it was deposited there more than fifty years ago.

In a book of similar intent to-day, the style is less stiff and more colloquial, illustrations are effectively sprinkled through the pages, and an attempt is made to blend scholarship with charm. Some publishers have deliberately sought for biographies which might compete successfully with novels, and, in such notable cases as Faÿ’s Franklin and Adams’s The Adams Family, they have been rewarded. In their zeal, they have even committed the unpardonable sin, — the publication of a biography without an index, — thus justly incurring the contempt of Mr. H. L. Mencken. It will be found, however, that the sale of even such an exceptionally popular book as Werner’s Barnum or Hackett’s Henry the Eighth is not comparable with that of the ‘best seller’ in prose fiction.

VIII

Everything considered, then, Strachey and the best of his disciples have made an appreciable contribution to the improvement of biography as a fine art. They have been rebuked by the ‘unco guid’ and accused of prostituting an ancient and reputable form of literature for ignoble ends. Now that Strachey is dead and his work can be surveyed as a whole, we perceive that his product was not large and that his scope was limited. But we also cannot be blind to his brilliance and audacity, and we feel, without being able to prove it, that his books are of a kind which the world cannot willingly let die. He appeared, furthermore, at a moment when his influence was salutary and stimulating. Historically, his importance is very great.

Of the making and publication of books, even during the Great Depression, there is, and there will be, no end. One amusing consequence of hard times has been the rush of former stockbrokers, prize fighters, cowboys, bartenders, manufacturers, and artisans to literature as a possible means of livelihood, requiring little capital and no exceptional ability. This is not so absurd as it seems. Even the most humble man is usually confident in his heart of hearts that, if he had cared to do so, he could have rivaled Sinclair Lewis, or at least Gamaliel Bradford — for, after all, as one of my friends observed with exquisite tact, ‘Bradford was only a biographer.’ Indubitably, then, we are to have more biographies, and biographers will earn at least small sums in royalties by selling their books to one another.

Of the various types of books published annually in the United States, biography stands fourth in numbers, being exceeded only by prose fiction, juveniles, and religious works. In 1929, 667 biographies were published in this country, of which 405 were by American authors. Fortunately, these were not all undertaken by self-deluded amateurs. We should be profoundly grateful for the autobiographies of Bishop Lawrence, of Eddie Eagan, of Lincoln Steffens, of Clarence Darrow, and of Prince von Bülow. We have recently had Mr. Howe’s Moorfield Storey, Mr. Van Wyck Brooks’s Emerson, Mr. Allan Nevins’s Grover Cleveland, and Mr. Claude G. Bowers’s Beveridge, each by an experienced craftsman. And there are more to come!

The books just mentioned are all political biographies, and the standard in that field is steadily rising. At the present moment, for example, authorities on the history of the United States since the Civil War are numerous, and they make unamiable reviewers. With unerring memories and eyes brightened by habitual proof reading, they pounce with vulpine glee upon any error of date or name or any erroneous interpretation of facts. Full documentation, with specific references, is required for every statement. For an aspiring biographer, this is a healthful atmosphere, since, if he is not accurate and thorough, he cannot escape the penalty of his sins. The rivalry among political biographers is so intense that each new competitor is consciously on his mettle. The art of biography is profiting thereby.

What, in the light of all this discussion, is the biographer’s conception of his function to-day? To be entirely candid, he probably sits down at his typewriter without any clearly defined set of rules to guide him. Not until after the ode has been composed does the poet begin to explain how he conceived it and to evolve his theories of poetic art. So it is, I am sure, with biography. I do know, however, that the biographer must consult every available source of information, — letters, memoirs, diaries, newspapers, and government documents, — and that he can seldom be sure where he will be rewarded. All this miscellaneous material must then be sifted for relevancy and significance. He will, of course, visit the places which his hero frequented and will attempt to get atmosphere and absorb local color. As his investigations progress, he will find that the accumulated details are coalescing around salient points, until a rough plan emerges from the chaos. Then, when he is moved to write, he will remember that, in the long run, sincerity outlasts sensationalism, and that what is fantastic is likely to be ephemeral.

If he has the authentic gift for biography, his portrait will, after infinite labor, be polished and perfected until it merits in some degree the praise bestowed by Dunn upon Froude’s Carlyle: ‘We see, before our very eyes, the pilgrimage of Carlyle from birth to death; we see his Titanic struggle with life; we see him go down into the darkening shadow.’ If his readers can see and feel like this, the biographer will know that, his work has been well done, even though his book may not be listed among the ‘best sellers.’