I seem to remember having lately seen at the Zoo a strange and
melancholy fowl, of a tortoise-shell complexion, glaring sullenly from
a cage, with that curious look of age and toothlessness that eagles
have, from the overlapping of the upper mandible of the beak above the
lower; it was labelled the _Monkey-eating Eagle_. Its food lay untasted
on the floor; it much preferred, no doubt, and from no fault of its
own, poor thing, a nice, plump, squalling baboon to the finest of chops
without the fun!
But the name set me thinking, and brought to mind a very different kind
of creature, from whom I have suffered much of late, the _Eagle-eating
Monkey_ by which I mean the writer of bad books about great people. I
had personally always supposed that I would rather read even a poor
book about a real human being than the cleverest of books about
imaginary people; at least I thought so till I was obliged to read a
large number of memoirs and biographies, written some by stupid
painstaking people, and some by clever aggravating people, about a
number of celebrated persons.
The stupid book is tiresome enough, because it ends by making one feel
that there is a real human being whom one cannot get at behind all the
tedious paragraphs, like some one stirring and coughing behind a
screen--or even more like the outline of a human figure covered up with
a quilt, so that one can just infer which is the head and which the
feet, but with the outlines all overlaid with a woolly padded texture
of meaningless words. Such biographers as these are hardly eagle-eating
monkeys. They are rather monkeys who would eat a live eagle if they
could catch one, and will mangle a dead one if they can find him. The
marvel is that with material at their command, with friends of their
victim to interrogate, and sometimes even with a personal knowledge of
him, they can yet contrive to avoid telling one anything interesting or
characteristic. The only points which seem to strike them are the
points in which their hero resembled other people, not the points in
which he differed from others. They tell you that they remember an
interesting conversation with the great man, and go on to say that no
words could do justice to the charm of his talk. Or they will tell you
his views on Free Trade or the Poor Law, and quote long extracts from
his speeches and public utterances. But they never admit one behind the
scenes, either because they were never there themselves, or did not
know it when they were. Or, worse still, they will say that they do not
think it decorous to violate the privacy of his domestic circle, with
the result that there comes out a figure like the statue of a statesman
in a public garden, in bronze frock-coat and trousers, with a roll of
paper in his hand, addressing the world in general, with the rain
dripping from his nose and his coat-tails.
That is a very bad kind of biography; and the worst of it is that it is
often the result of a pompous consciousness of virtue and fidelity,
which argues that because a man disliked personal paragraphs about his
favourite dishes and his private amusements, when he was alive, he
would therefore resent a picture of his real life being drawn when he
was dead; and this inconvenient decorum arises from a deep-seated
poverty of imagination, which regards death as converting all alike
into a species of angels, and which can only conceive of heaven as a
sort of cathedral, with the spirits of eminent men employed as canons
in perpetual residence. Thus it is bad biography because it is false
biography, emphasising virtues and omitting faults, and, what is almost
worse, omitting characteristic traits.
But it is not the worst kind of biography. The joy of the real
eagle-eating biographer is to do what Tennyson bluntly described as
ripping up people like pigs, and violating not privacy but decency;
sweeping together odious little anecdotes, recording meannesses and
weaknesses and sillinesses, all the things of which the subject himself
was no doubt heartily ashamed and discarded as eagerly as possible.
Such biographies give one the sense of a man diving in sewers, grubbing
in middens, prying into cupboards, peeping round corners. To try as far
as possible to surprise your hero, and to catch him off his guard, is a
very different thing from being frank and candid. I remember once
coming upon the track of one of these ghouls. He was writing a Life of
a somewhat eccentric politician, and wrote to me asking me to obtain
for him a sight of a certain document. I forwarded his letter to the
relatives of the man in question. What was my surprise when they
replied that the biographer was not only wholly unauthorised by
themselves, but that they had written to him to remonstrate against his
expressed intention, and to beg him to desist. I forwarded the letter
to him, and added some comments of my own. The only result was that he
replied regretting the opposition of the relatives, saying that the
life of a public man was public property, and that he thought it his
duty to continue his researches. The book appeared, and a vile rag-bag
it was, like the life of a man written by a private detective from the
reminiscences of under-servants. The worst of it is that such a
compilation brings a man money, because there are always plenty of
people who like to dabble in mud; and a ghoul is the most impervious of
beings, probably because a ghoul of this species regards himself merely
as an unprejudiced seeker after truth, and claims to be what he would
call a realist.
The reason why such realism is bad art is not because the details are
untrue, but because the proportion is wrong. One cannot tell everything
in a biography, unless one is prepared to write on the scale of a
volume for each week of the hero's life. The art of the biographer is
to select what is salient and typical, not what is abnormal and
negligible; what he should aim at is to suggest, by skilful touches, a
living portrait. If the subject is bald and wrinkled, he must be
painted so. But there is no excuse for trying to depict his hero's
toe-nails, unless there is a very valid reason for doing so. And there
is still less excuse for painting them so big that one can see little
else in the picture! _Ex ungue leonem_, says the proverb; but it is a
scientific and not an artistic maxim.
One sometimes wonders what will be the future of biographies; how, as
libraries get fuller and records increase, it will be possible ever to
write the lives of any but men of prime importance. I suppose the
difficulty will solve itself in some perfectly simple and obvious
manner; but the obstacle is that, as reading gets more common, the
circle of trivial people who are interested in trousers and toe-nails
and in little else does undoubtedly increase. Moreover, instead of
fewer biographies being written, more and more people seem to be
commemorated in stodgy volumes; and further, the selection could not be
made by authority, because the kind of lives that are wanted are not
the lives of dull important people, but the lives of interesting and
unimportant people who have given their vividness and originality to
life itself, to talk and letters and complex relationships; we do not
want the lives of people who have prosed on platforms and bawled at the
openings of bazaars. They have said their say, and we have heard as
much as we need to hear of their views already. But I know half-a-dozen
people, of whose words and works probably no record whatever will be
made, whose lives, if they could be painted, would be more interesting
than any novel, and more inspiring than any sermon; who have not taken
things for granted, but have made up their own minds; and, what is
more, have really had minds to make up; who have said, day after day,
fine, humorous, tender, illuminating things; who have loved life better
than routine, and ideas-better than success; who have really enriched
the blood of the world, instead of feebly adulterating it; who have
given their companions zest and joy, trenchant memories and eager
emotions: but the whole process has been so delicate, so evasive, so
informal, that it seems impossible to recapture the charm in heavy
words. A man who would set himself to write the life of one of these
delightful people, instead of adding to the interminable stream of
tiresome romances which inundate us, might leave a very fine legacy to
the world. It would mean an immense amount of trouble, and the
cultivation of a Boswellian memory--for such a book would consist
largely of recorded conversations--but what a hopeful and uplifting
thing it would be to read and re-read!
The difficulty is that to a perceptive man--and none but a man of the
finest perception could do it,--an eagle-eating eagle, in fact--it
would seem a ghoulish and a treacherous business. He would feel like an
interviewer and like a spy. It would have to be done in a noble,
self-denying sort of secrecy, amassing and recording day by day; and he
would never be able to let his hero suspect what was happening, or the
gracious spontaneity would vanish; for the essence of such a life and
such talk as I have described is that they should be wholly frank and
unconsidered; and the thought of the presence of the note-taking
spectator would overshadow its radiance at once.
There is a task for a patient, unambitious, perceptive man! He must be
a man of infinite leisure, and he must be ready to take a large risk of
disappointment; for he must outlive his subject, and he must be willing
to sacrifice all other opportunities of artistic creation. But he might
write one of the great books of the world, and win a secure seat upon
the Muses' Hill.