CHAPTER VIII

EXPOSITORY BIOGRAPHY

Biography is of three kinds. First there is the purely dramatic, such

as we find in the plays of Shakespeare, Barrie, and others, and often

in novels of the more dramatic kind, which sets the subject to marching

up and down before our eyes, with the gestures and the speech of life.

Such biography sometimes covers a whole life, more often only a fraction

from which we are to judge of the whole. From this kind of biography

we draw our own conclusions of the hero; the producer sweeps aside the

curtain, displays his people, bows, and leaves us to our comment. This

is a most stimulating form of writing. The reader vicariously treads the

Roman Forum, or fights under the banner of the great Alfred, or perhaps

jostles in the surge of politics, or dreams an artist's dream, or even

performs the humble chores of a lonely farmhouse. The personalities may

never have lived except in the writer's brain, yet who that has read of

Colonel Newcome ever lets fade from his list of friends that delightful

gentleman? Who that has once met Falstaff forgets the roaring, jolly

old knave? Stevenson gave witness that almost more than from any one

else his courage and good cheer in dark days had caught fire from the

personality of Shakespeare's heroine Rosalind. If these persons of the

imagination can stimulate, how much more ought the subjects of the other

two forms of biography to fire the brain, for they are usually taken

from real life, are people who have faced the actual problems such as

the reader is meeting, people who have perhaps flamed in a glorious

career from birth to death or perhaps have gone quietly all their

days. The second form of biography is purely analytical. It watches

its subject, follows him through life, and only after this study sets

down its words, which aim to state for the reader the meaning of the

life. Such biography is illustrated in the brief analyses of Mr. Balfour

and Mr. Hardy on page 148. Here the author is the logical thinker who

draws the conclusions of careful meditation and says: such was the

significance of this man, this woman. The third kind of biography, the

expository, the kind with which we are here concerned, attempts to

combine the other two, hopes to present the pageant of life which the

hero lived, and especially to make an estimate of its importance, its

significance. Some novels approach this form when the author stops,

as Thackeray often does, to comment on the meaning of his people and

their deeds. This kind of biography attempts to accomplish what Carlyle

thought should be attempted, the ability to say, "There is my hero,

there is the physiognomy and meaning of his appearance and transit on

this earth; such was he by nature, so did the world act on him, so he on

the world, with such result and significance for himself and us."

The Problem

The primary object of expository biography is so to build up before the

reader's eyes the figure of the hero, so to cast against the background

of life the warm personality, so to recreate the lineaments and so to

give perspective to the whole that the reader will know the hero, will

be able to grasp his hand as a fellow human being with the game of life

to play, and will be aware of the significance of the personality to his

times and to the reader himself. To _paint the man_ is the pleasurable

adventure before the writer. Sir Christopher Wren bade us, if we wished

a memorial of him, to "look around" upon the arches and the high dim

places of his cathedral. So the writer of expository biography must

plant himself in the deeds and desires of his hero, must gaze steadily

into his eyes until he discovers the center of his being, and must then

set down the words, which, if well enough chosen, wisely enough fitted,

will outlast the toughest stone. It is in lack of true comprehension

of the hero's life that so many expository biographies fail to inspire

the reader, in the failure to remember that the writer is not merely

"silently expressing old mortality, the ruins of forgotten times," but

is trying to catch and record a living force, to live as long as men

understand it and are moved by it.

The chief duty of the biographer, then, is to discover the life-problem

of his hero, to understand it, to learn how the hero came by it, how

he tried to solve it, and what its significance is. Now this is much

more easily accomplished with the personalities who have closed their

span of existence than with those whom we know still living, with

their answer to their problem yet incomplete. Few of us have what

Mary Lamb said she possessed, "a knack I know I have of looking into

peoples' real character and never expecting them to act out of it--never

expecting another to do as I would in the same case." All the facts of

personality, the hints and gleams and shadows, bewilder us at times with

our friends, and we regret the lack of perspective that reveals the

central life-problem. But when we turn to Julius Cæsar, to Jeanne d'Arc,

to George Washington, or to some humble dweller of past days, we can

see the life whole, can discover the heredity, the natural endowment,

the surroundings, the changing deeds and the shifting acquaintances and

friends that determined for the hero what the life-problem should be.

With the truly remarkable advantage, then, of this central conception,

we can fall into cadence with the stride of our hero marching against

his problem and can picture forth the struggle and its significance.

In every biography there is this problem. Your hero is at "that game

of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least,"

as Stevenson called life, and the manner in which the hero perceives

the "imperious desires and staggering consequences" will determine the

flavor of his life. To turn to Stevenson himself we find a white-hot

flame of romance cased in a feeble wraith of a body, the heart of the

man daring all things, romping through life a deathless youth before the

problem of adjustment between body and spirit. Or take the compounding

of that tremendous figure, George Washington--adamant integrity, the

zeal which, if unchecked, would often have brought the house tumbling

about his ears, the endless capacity for indignation, and with these

the patience that left men well-nigh dazed and the self-control that

made him god-like. Set him in the midst of the hurly-burly of a young

nation as doubtful of itself as youth, as eager, as impetuous, as

contradictory, with the forces of the Old World pitted against it and

with many traitors in its fold. Then conceive the problem of forming

wise conjunction between vision and accomplishment, between desire

and restraint, and the life of the man is at once unified, centered,

illuminated, and made significant.

The same result follows searching to the heart of any hero, high or low,

and failure thus to reach the heart causes the pallid uninteresting

heaping of details that mean nothing to the reader. No architect can

glorify the horizon with the silhouette of a cathedral, nor can he even

give a meaning to his accumulation of stone and mosaic and mortar, if

he heaps here a pile and there a pile, rears here a chapel, somewhere

else as fancy directs lays out an aisle, with no central problem of

relationship. Nor can you dignify your hero's nature with a mere basket

collection of the flying chips of life--a deed here, a word there, a

desire at another time. First, then, discover the problem that your hero

faced in the relation of his character to itself and to its times.

The Chief Aid in Solving the Problem

To discover the problem, really to understand it, requires as your

chief tool imaginative sympathy. Without this your writing will leave

your hero as flat and shiny as any conscientiously laundered piece of

linen. You are to picture him in relief, in the round, to make him live

again, step down from his pedestal, and put his shoulder alongside

ours and speak to us. We read in a history that faces the necessity of

condensation how William the Conqueror "consolidated his domains"--and

it means nothing at all to us of stimulating individual value. We do

not think of the recalcitrant underlings whose necks he had to force to

bow, of the weary eyes that gladly closed at the end of a terrible day's

work, of the frequent desire, which at times must be suppressed, perhaps

at times gratified, to run a sword through an opposing subject. We

forget, in other words, that William was a man, a personality, a bundle

of nervous reactions and desires. But the writing fails, as biography,

unless we do remember these things. It is in the discovery and

understanding of these details and in combining them into a personality

that our sympathy is required. No one should set pen to paper in the

service of biography who has not a lively personal interest in his hero,

who has not an open, loving feeling for him--saint or villain whichever

he may be--and desires to make his reader, in turn, _feel_ the hero's

personality. The ideal biographer is he who can peep out through the

eyes of his hero at the sights which he saw, can feel the surge of

ambition, of love, of hate, the quickening of the heart at success, and

the cold pallor of defeat. We have seen a grown person watch with cold

eyes a child who wrestles with a problem of digging a ditch or building

a dam or making a harness for the dog, gradually lose the coldness of

indifference, forget the gulf of years, kindle to the problem, and

finally with delight catch up spade or leather and give assistance.

Until you feel a similar thrill of sharing experience with your hero, do

not write about him.

Most of us really have this interest but we browbeat ourselves into

a belief that a biography, especially an expository biography, must

be dull. And, sad though we may be to admit it, most such biographies

written for courses in literature or history, are--well, plain stupid.

The lives are, to use Samuel Johnson's words, "begun with a pedigree and

ended with a funeral," and the dull stretch between is a mere series of

events which find unity only in that they all happen to the same person.

Such writing is, truly, inexcusable; it is like the railway journey of

the unfortunate soul who sees nothing but the clambering aboard and then

the folding of the hands for a long dull jouncing until lethargy can be

thrown off and it is time to clamber down again. Had the traveler but

the insight, or the inclination, he would perceive that his journey is

a high adventure spiced with a delicious flavor of challenge and reply.

Just so you may find that the writing of expository biography has the

charm of life itself. The patient clerk bends over his record sheet and

attests the arrival, the departure, of lifeless baggage tossed from hand

to hand, from car to car, piled up, taken down and set finally to rest

at its destination. But you deal not with lifeless baggage but with the

fascinating compound of flesh and blood, of desire and of will, that

changes the face of the world. No mere matter-of-fact attitude here,

but the perpetual wonder and joy at the turns and flashes of human

personality. Rather than be a matter-of-fact man Lamb wisely preferred

being a "matter-of-lie" man; the writer of expository biography finds

that his material is of such a nature as to be more interesting even

than lies. As Sir Thomas Browne said of his not remarkable life, "which

to relate were not a history but a piece of poetry and would sound to

common ears a fable."

Most of us find that the most fascinating study for man is Man. Not

only do we believe that "man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and

pompous in the grave," but that while alive he is more alluring than

anything else. We might conceivably even argue that Socrates advised

"Know thyself" out of fear lest our curiosity about our fellows absorb

all our effort. But so great is our fear of the formality of biography

that we often belie our sympathy and think that only the large dim

figures of the past, kings and potentates, who stride through mighty

events, are possible for treatment. Our fear is false. Stevenson was

again correct in saying, "The man who lost his life against a hen roost

is in the same pickle with the man who lost his life against a fortified

place of the first order." No life ever existed--absolutely not

one--that was not capable of an absorbing expository biography. The true

biographer never takes the point of view of the philosopher who said,

"Most men and women are merely one couple more." Rather he knows that,

however slight in the sweeping cycle of time a stick of striped candy

may be, to the child who drops it into the gutter it is of more weight

than a royal scepter. He knows, too, that the ordinary, respectable

citizen, one of the "common people," though he never is subject to

scandal like a villain and never molds kingdoms like the great figures

of history, is nevertheless, in his quiet sphere, a fit hero for

biography. He sees that to such a person the gaining, through patient

years of toil, of a little homestead, is as great a victory as for an

emperor to conquer a country, that to be elected moderator of the town

meeting or president of the "literary club" is a large adventure. Barrie

had the imagination to see that the day when the six haircloth chairs

entered his mother's parlor as the culmination of a long campaign, was a

day to her of thrilling adventure, of conquest, of triumph. And yet we

are afraid that biography ought to be dull!

Fear of the formality of writing is often the cause of our making

expository biography a mere combination of the succession of events

which history shows and a few dull comments about the subject, instead

of a real interpretation illuminated with the magic of sympathetic

understanding. With this fear upon us we write as awkwardly, as

lifelessly, as we deport ourselves at a reception where we forget the

pulse of humanity and are clutched by the fear of--we know not what.

Such a fear would palsy the hand of him who should attempt to weave

even the treasury of facts in the following statement with an estimate

of their significance. Writing of General Judah P. Benjamin, of the

American Civil War, Mr. Gamaliel Bradford says:

Benjamin was a Jew. He was born a British subject. He made a

brilliant reputation at the Louisiana Bar and was offered a seat in

the United States Supreme Court. He became United States senator.

When his state seceded, he went with it, and filled three cabinet

positions under the Confederacy. He fell with the immense collapse

of that dream fabric. Then, at the age of fifty-four, he set

himself to build up a new fortune and a new glory, and he died one

of the most successful and respected barristers in London.[90]

[90] Gamaliel Bradford: _Judah P. Benjamin_. By courtesy of The

Atlantic Monthly Company.

But with fear thrown off, with enthusiastic desire really to understand

sympathetically, we find no lack of interest. To any one the terrible

storm in the harbor of Apia, when ships were wrecked like straws and

lives were spilled out by scores, would offer material because of the

horror of the events. But only with imaginative sympathy could we write

an expository biography of a humble "Jackie" on a United States boat

in the harbor. With such sympathy, as we read that after the gruelling

agony of long fruitless fighting against the storm the sailors of the

United States Steamship _Trenton_, which was pounding its wooden hull to

splinters on the reef, climbed into the rigging and cheered while the

more lucky British boat _Calliope_ steamed past on her way to safety

in the open sea, we are thrilled with the fact that of those gallant

seamen every one is worthy of record. Some quiet lad from perhaps a

white farmhouse tucked into a little valley, who was honestly doing his

duty and hoping for the glory of the time when he should be a petty

officer, now while the teeth of death are already bared gloriously lifts

up his young voice in gallant recognition of his more successful fellows

of the _Calliope_! And yet the official record of the event would imply

no possibility of finding romance in this humble individual life.

The "meanest flower that blows" moved the poet's heart; we need not

be poets, but only sympathetic human beings, with the great gift of

comradeship, to be moved by even the lowliest man or woman. And the

objection that rises unbidden and declares us unfit to write expository

biography because we have not ourselves known great men is false. Quite

truly Carlyle demolishes such objection: "What make ye of Parson White

of Selborne? He had not only no great men to look on, but not even

men; merely sparrows and cockchafers; yet has he left us a _Biography_

of these; which, under its title _Natural History of Selborne_, still

remains valuable to us; which has copied a little sentence or two

_faithfully_ from the Inspired Volume of Nature, and is itself not

without inspiration. Go ye and do likewise." Certainly if you face the

setting forth of the life of some large figure of the past you have

a fascinating pageant to unriddle, to centralize. And just as surely

if you turn to the familiar figures of your home town, of your family

history, and really lay your spirit alongside, you will find deep

significance for yourself and for your reader. For every human being has

its Waterloo. Sometimes we play Wellington, sometimes Bonaparte, but

whether winning or losing we all tread the same way, and the fight is

as significant to each as ever the victory or defeat of Waterloo was to

Wellington or Napoleon.

The Process of Solving the Problem

With this great requisite of imaginative sympathy that sees value in

all human beings, then, we set out on our chief task, to find the

life-problem of our particular hero. This necessitates definition and

analysis. Somehow we must find the sphere in which our hero moved, the

group to which he belonged, and must then discover the qualities that he

showed in the group which made him a real individual. Such definition

and analysis will appear when we examine the character of the hero and

the events in his life.

1. Defining the Character

In placing the subject of biography in a group we must take care to

unify the character and at the same time to escape making him merely

typical. A biography is a portrait, and if it omits the peculiar

lineaments that distinguish the hero from all others, if it overlooks

the little details of personality, it is valueless, and certainly

uninteresting. The names of characters in old dramas, such as _Justice

Clement_, _Justice Shallow_, _Fastidious Brisk_, _Sir Politick

Would-be_, and of some of Scott's characters such as _Poundtext_, _Rev.

Gabriel Kettledrummle_, _Mr. Holdenough_, indicate the central point

of view of the characters but do not individualize them. Before we are

really interested in these people we must see the personal traits that

give charm. The unifying and centralizing of the character will be

accomplished through discovering the fundamental nature. When Cavour

wrote, "I am a son of Liberty, and it is to her that I owe all that I

am," he classified himself at once through revealing the inner heart

of his being. Mr. George Whibley gives both outward action and inward

attitude when he writes, "George Buchanan was the type and exemplar of

the wandering Scot." So a writer in the New York _Nation_[91] classifies

William James by finding the controlling motives of his life. "He was

a force of expansion, not a force of concentration. He 'opens doors

and windows,' shakes out a mind that has long lain in the creases of

prejudice. He is the most vital and gifted exemplar of intellectual

sympathy." Again, Mr. Bradford, in characterizing General Sherman,

writes, "Sherman is like one of our clear blue January days, with a

fresh north wind. It stimulates you. It inspires you. But crisp, vivid,

intoxicating as it is, it seems to me that too prolonged enjoyment of

such weather would dry my soul till the vague fragrance of immortality

was all gone out of it." And when some one asked Goldsmith, referring

to Boswell, "Who is this Scotch cur at Johnson's heels?" Goldsmith

replied, "He is not a cur, he is only a bur. Tom Davies flung him at

Johnson in sport, and he has the faculty of sticking." Each of these

characterizations classifies the subject; no one of them makes him a

distinct personality, for thousands have been wandering Scots, forces

of expansion, burs. The typifying is of great value in establishing the

central point of view of the subject, but it cannot be left to stand

alone in a real portrait.

[91] Vol. 94, p. 363.

It is necessary that we define our hero by determining the class to

which he belongs, but such definition brings a great danger, the danger

of making a warped interpretation. At once we must take care, when we

discover the type of a man, not to overwork the type qualities, not to

make everything conform to this inner core, whether the detail properly

fits or not. For example, once we have called a man a _liberal_ we

shall need to guard against denying the conservative acts which are

in themselves contradictory of the general nature though in the large

they fuse with it. Such a tag is likely, if not guarded against, to

make the writer the victim of a kind of color-blindness in character,

so that he can see only the crimson of _liberal_, the lavender of

_conservative_. In a sentence like the following there lurks the

possibility of overworking a point of view, of riding rough-shod over

details that do not immediately swing into line. Speaking of General

Hooker, "General Walker observes shrewdly, 'He was handsome and

picturesque in the extreme, but with a fatally weak chin' ... Bear it

in mind in our further study." Spontaneity of reaction to the hero is

in possible danger of extinction when the biographer has solidly set

down the class name. The same danger is at hand when we find and state

the controlling motive of the hero's life, as when we say that he was

primarily ambitious, or exhibited above everything else courage. We need

be careful lest trivial matters be made to appear ambitious, thrillingly

courageous, and lest we deny what seems contradictory. In the following

characterization of the historian Green by his friend the Rev. Mr.

Haweis we find no such cramping effect, but a welling forth of creative

impression that makes Green live before our eyes.

That slight nervous figure, below the medium height; that tall

forehead, with the head prematurely bald; the quick but small eyes,

rather close together; the thin mouth, with lips seldom at rest,

but often closed tightly as though the teeth were clenched with an

odd kind of latent energy beneath them; the slight, almost feminine

hands; the little stoop; the quick alert step; the flashing

exuberance of spirits; the sunny smile; the torrent of quick

invective, scorn, or badinage, exchanged in a moment for a burst of

sympathy or a delightful and prolonged flow of narrative--all this

comes back to me vividly! And what narrative, what anecdote, what

glancing wit! What a talker! A man who shrank from society, and yet

was so fitted to adorn and instruct every company he approached,

from a parochial assembly to a statesman's reception! But how

enchanting were my walks with him in the Victoria Park, that one

outlet of Stepney and Bethnal Green! I never in my life so lost

count of time with any one before or since.... I have sometimes,

after spending the evening with him at my lodgings, walked back to

St. Philip's Parsonage, Stepney, towards midnight, talking; then he

has walked back with me in the summer night, talking; and when the

dawn broke it has found us belated somewhere in the lonely Mile

End Road, still unexhausted, and still talking.[92]

[92] Haweis: _Music and Morals_. By courtesy of the publishers,

Longmans, Green & Co., New York City.

But when we have inveighed as much as we need against the dangers of

classification, we must swing round to the first statement that for

unifying the character and giving it fundamental significance such

classification is of great importance.

Merely to find the type to which a character belongs is not sufficient;

such a process leaves the character stamped, to be sure, but without

interest. We care for living people not chiefly because of their type

but because of their individuality, the little traits that set them

apart from their fellows. The next step, therefore, is to discover and

reveal the individuality. The type to which a character belongs is shown

by the large sweep of his whole life; his individuality is revealed

often most clearly in the slight incidents by the way. For this reason

the personal anecdote assumes importance as adding both interest and

completeness that consists in filling in the broad expanses of the

portrait with the lines of individual expression. This does not mean

that all anecdotes are of value for expository biography; only those

which are truly in the stream of personality, which help to establish

either the type or the individual. The whimsical nature of the little

incident which Mr. George Whibley[93] relates of the "scoundrel" Tom

Austin is of value not because it makes a picturesque note at a hanging,

but because it really helps to establish the full picture of the man:

"When Tom Austin was being haltered for hanging, the Chaplain asked

him had he anything to say. 'Only, there's a woman yonder with some

curds and whey, and I wish I could have a pennyworth of them before

I am hanged, because I don't know when I shall see any again.'" It

is easily said that Lincoln was a great democratic soul and a great

humorist. These are two useful tags. But when we know that to the

Englishman who remarked, "In England, you know, no gentleman blacks

his own shoes," he replied, "Whose does he black, then?" we feel the

peculiar tang of the Lincoln personality along with the type qualities

of democrat and humorist. After we have classified Washington as an

austere, cold, unemotional being, we find both corrective for a too

narrow classification, and insight into the peculiar qualities of the

man when we read how he swore "like an angel from Heaven" on the famous

occasion of the encounter with Lee. For the anecdote is, we see, really

in the main flow of Washington's nature. General Wolfe is tagged as a

romantic young warrior but takes on both interest and personality when

we read of his repeating Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"

as his men silently rowed him to the battle on the Heights of Abraham.

The personality of Madame de Staël's father is largely illuminated when

we learn that though the little daughter sat primly at table as long as

her mother remained in the room, as soon as she retired, with a cry of

delight the child flung her napkin at her father's head. Anecdote is

highly useful so long as we remember that it is not for adornment but

for revelation, not primarily for interest--though that is an important

function--but rather for proving in dramatic particular the quality

which we claim for our hero. Properly chosen anecdotes should be the

high lights in the proof of qualities which the writer's exposition

establishes in more sober manner. And of course they also serve to show

the differentia which make the character an individual, and thus help to

complete the definition.

[93] _A Book of Scoundrels._

2. Analyzing the Character

_a._ _Heredity_

When once we have defined the character, have found its class and

to some extent its differentia, we can by analysis add to our

comprehension of it and to the distinguishing personal traits. We must

break up the character and see its manifestations and the results of

the influences that molded it. Heredity at once demands recognition.

It is not insignificant that Emerson was the descendant of a long line

of New England clergymen. The bravery of Stevenson is accounted for

partly by the doughty old builder of lighthouses, his grandfather Robert

Stevenson. Descent holds often, apparently, a guiding rein in directing

a character into its life-problem. Emerson's problem was comparatively

simplified, so far as personal integrity concerned him, for he was

by nature good. Lowell testified that it was perfectly natural for

himself to turn to literature, since in his childhood he had become

so accustomed to the smell of Russia leather in the bindings of his

father's books. The following sentence[94] shows the grip of descent

through the centuries which is not disguised by the man's name: "The

Mr. Balfour of those days has been altogether outgrown by the Admiralty

First Lord of the existing coalition, a Balfour in name only, in breadth

of shoulders, thickness of frame, heaviness of jaw, and proportions of

forehead a Cecil marvelously recalling, not only his illustrious uncle,

but that relative's Elizabethan ancestors." "Men are what their mothers

made them," says Emerson. "You may as well ask a loom which weaves

huckabuck why it does not make cashmere, as expect poetry from this

engineer, or a chemical discovery from that jobber." Partly, at least,

the life-problem is determined by the heredity; to each there is but one

future, "and that is already determined in his lobes and described in

that little fatty face, pig-eye, and squat form," to quote Emerson again

even though he lays undue stress, perhaps, upon the power of descent. In

the paragraph which follows you will find an interesting account of the

ancestry of O. W. Holmes, with a statement also of the essential quiet

of his life, which is nevertheless so often thought of as worthy of

biographical treatment.

[94] T. H. S. Escott: _Great Victorians_. T. Fisher Unwin, London.

Dr. Holmes came of this good, old, unmixed New England stock

that ran back to Hell on the one side in the severest orthodoxy

and up to Heaven on the other in large liberality. He discovered

that the title deeds were all in Heaven--while all other claims

were by squatters' rights outside the Garden of Eden. So Dr. Holmes

grew into a Unitarian and proceeded to cultivate the descent which

lies outside Paradise. His father was a minister, so beautiful in

countenance, Holmes tells us, that he could never have believed

an unkind thing, and his mother of different line was a Liberal

by descent. Holmes was born, too, to the conflicting traditions

of Yale and Harvard; but beyond being born, practically nothing

ever happened to him afterwards. He had a little group of friends

who were actually companions. During his whole life, except the

two years of medical study in Europe in the beginning of his

career, and the "hundred days in Europe" celebrated in one of his

later books, he was never further away from Boston, for the most

part, than Salem or Beverly, that Beverly, to which he referred

in replying to a friend who had addressed a letter to him from

"Manchester-by-the-Sea," as "Beverly-by-the-Depot." He went some

summers to Pittsfield where he had a summer house, and where the

sparkling Berkshire air seemed to suit his effervescent mind.

But he was never "quite at home beyond the smell of the Charles

River."[95]

[95] Thomas R. Slicer: _From Poet to Premier_. By courtesy of the

publishers, The Grolier Society, London.

_b._ _Interests_

Then when your hero grows up, what are his interests? To what profession

or kind of work does he turn? Where does he find the satisfaction for

his energy that searches an outlet? Does he, like Thomas Carlyle, try

one and another profession only to fail and be driven, finally, into

the one work in which he could find the answer to the life-problem that

his personality presents? When his profession is chosen, what are his

interests? Does he work out his problem in a narrowly restricted field,

or does he call in the powers of a wide range of significant pursuits?

No expository biography of Leonardo da Vinci can overlook the astounding

breadth of the man's activity, especially as shown in the remarkable

document which he presented to Ludovico Sforza arranging his attainments

under nine different headings in military engineering and adding a tenth

for civil engineering and architecture,--and finally throwing in, as a

suggestion, his worth as painter and sculptor! There were the compounds

of a life-problem sufficiently complex to satisfy the most captious. Or

if the hero never moves from a tiny hamlet, treads only one path--as

Pericles is said to have done between house and office during the great

days of his power--the fact is significant. The grasp of ideas within

whatever field the hero may choose is also important. The distinction

between the personality that is merely efficient in handling facts, and

the personality that dominates the facts and drives them at his bidding,

that shows real power, has direct bearing on the nature and the solution

of the life-problem.

_c._ _Beliefs_

Nor can you overlook the hero's beliefs, whether in ethics or religion,

in politics, in the laws of society. In the analysis of Mr. Balfour, on

page 148, at once is apparent the large influence on his answer that is

caused by his sophistication. The bravery of the Stoic, the voluptuous

sentimentality of many religious people of modern times, vitally affect

the nature of the character which possesses them. If your hero is by

nature an aristocrat, if his sympathies are limited to the few choice

people of the world, his life-problem is radically different from that

of the natural democrat like Abraham Lincoln. Finally, whatever ideas he

may hold about the relation in society of man to man, of man to woman,

will inevitably influence his solution of his particular question, just

as his beliefs are themselves partly determined by his physical being.

_d._ _Friends_

Closely allied with his beliefs will be his choice of friends. Has he

the gift of familiarity, or does he struggle in vain to break through

the bars of personality, or is he terrified at the gulf between himself

and another? Does he regard friends as useful instruments, as pleasant

companions, or as objects of devoted affection? And how do his friends

react to him? It is worth remembering that the boy Tennyson wrote,

in grief, "Byron is dead!"--not only the boy but the older poet is

illuminated by the words. Stephen A. Douglas holding Lincoln's hat

beside the platform while the Gettysburg Address was being delivered

showed not only the mellowness of his own nature but the commanding

power of friendship that Lincoln possessed. The number of friends and

the range of their activity--whether selected from all sections of human

activity or from the hero's own more limited field--are important.

_e._ _Deeds_

Finally, the deeds of the hero are of the greatest significance in

indicating how he met his life-problem. Did he "greet the unknown with

a cheer" or did he like a doubtful bather shrink back from plunging

into the stream of activity? Were his deeds actuated by generous

motives, or by petty? "If," says Stevenson, "it is for fame that men do

brave actions, they are only silly fellows after all." Macbeth strode

through large events, as did Robert E. Lee, yet the dominating motives

were quite different, and these motives throw the utmost light on the

fundamentals of character.

Before you write, then, first define your hero, find his type and his

individuality, and then analyze his character to determine his descent,

his intellectual interests, his beliefs, his friends, and his deeds.

And remember that these are not in water-tight compartments, separated

from each other, but that they fuse together to make the personality, to

create the life-problem, and to answer it.

The Use of Events in the Life

Dramatic biography is almost wholly the moving events of life. The evil

of cheap fiction is partly that it will be nothing but events, that

only dust will be raised, no meaning found. Expository biography may

err in the opposite direction and exclude the "moving show," become

only abstract analysis and definition. You must guard against this,

because absence of events both complicates the writer's task and makes

his success with the reader more problematic. Moreover, since so largely

the positive personality of the hero will express itself in action,

since largely through events we shall discover what the life-problem is

and especially how it is met, to omit the flow of events is to lame the

interpretation. All readers, it is well to remember, have the child's

desire for more than mere information about the machine; they wish to

"see it go." The vitality of fiction is always increased by dramatic

presentation. Since you have a real character to make vital, bring to

your writing the devices that make characters real. Carlyle[96] well

characterizes the denatured style of treating living beings:

[96] Thomas Carlyle: "Biography," in _Critical and Miscellaneous

Essays_. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, publishers.

Those modern Narrations, of the Philosophic kind, where

"Philosophy, teaching by Experience," has to sit like owl

on housetop, _seeing_ nothing, _understanding_ nothing,

uttering only, with solemnity enough, her perpetual and most

wearisome hoo-hoo:--what hope have we, except the for the most

part fallacious one of gaining some acquaintance with our

fellow-creatures, though dead and vanished, yet dear to us; how

they got along in those old days, suffering and doing; to what

extent, and under what circumstances, they resisted the Devil and

triumphed over him, or struck their colors to him, and were trodden

under foot by him; how, in short, the perennial Battle went, which

men name Life, which we also in these new days, with indifferent

fortune have to fight, and must bequeath to our sons and grandsons

to go on fighting....

_a._ _Choice of Events_

The question at once arises, what events shall the writer select? The

total course is mapped for you: there is the pedigree, there the birth,

and finally there the funeral. These are inescapable. Just so, for most

heroes, marriage. But to choose only those facts that are common to all,

to make your hero do only the conventionally unavoidable things, will

leave him without personality. The question is, what did he do that was

peculiar to himself, what reaction to life did he alone, of all the

myriads, make? It is true that most men and women spend their time at

their profession or appointed task, whatever it may be, but what the

reader cries for is _how_ did they spend their time and energy? It is

not sufficient that you tell your reader that Robert Franz labored at

his profession of music. What you must do is to show how, in poverty,

which, but for the inexhaustible kindness of Liszt, would have been

unrelieved, with total deafness upon him, with his musician's-fingers

twisted and useless with paralysis, and with only slight recognition

from the world for his efforts, he quite beautifully subordinated

his own personality for the sake of his art and for years labored in

unremunerative love at the unwritten harmonies of Bach and Handel that

the public might have complete realization of the otherwise crippled

productions. When you tell that, your reader will understand _Robert

Franz_, not merely a somebody. Choose, then, the events that all share

in common if they are of value in giving a framework for your narrative

presentation, but especially choose those events that in their nature

illuminate the personality and complement your analysis.

We think of events as being public. There is also the hero's private

life. Often, especially with the more humble heroes, the home life

is more important than the public deeds, brings out more clearly the

real man than any amount of marching in the market place or discussing

in the public square. The incident related of Robert E. Lee when he

was President of Washington College is more revealing, almost, of his

greatness of heart than a far more important deed of the great General.

When a sophomore to whom Lee had recommended more intense application

to work, with the warning of possible failure, remarked, "But, General,

you failed," Lee quietly replied, "I hope that you may be more fortunate

than I." To neglect either public or private life makes the biography

less valuable; light upon the personality from whatever honest source is

to be eagerly sought.

_b._ _Relation of Events to Personality_

With your choice made, you yet face the difficulty of uniting events

and personality. It is not that you have parallel lines, one of action

and one of character; the two lines join and become one. You have the

choice of observing the personality through the medium of events, or

events through the medium of personality. Of the two, the latter is to

be preferred. To understand the personality we heed to know whether it

controls and directs events, or merely receives them. Into every life

a large measure of chance enters. Does the personality merely receive

the events, or does it master chance? Suppose that the following

analysis[97] of two widely different characters is correct, just:

[97] Amiel's _Journal_.

Mozart--grace, liberty, certainty, freedom, and precision of

style, and exquisite and aristocratic beauty, serenity of soul,

the health and talent of the master, both on a level with his

genius; Beethoven--more pathetic, more passionate, more torn with

feeling, more intricate, more profound, less perfect, more the

slave of his genius, more carried away by his fancy or his passion,

more moving, and more sublime than Mozart.... One is serene, the

other serious.... The first is stronger than destiny, because he

takes life less profoundly; the second is less strong, because

he has dared to measure himself against deeper sorrows.... In

Mozart the balance of the whole is perfect, and art triumphs; in

Beethoven feeling governs everything and emotion troubles his art

in proportion as it deepens it.

Now we know that Mozart's attitude toward patrons was sweetly

deferential and graceful, whereas Beethoven rushed into the courtyard

of his patron Prince Lobkowitz, shouting, "Lobkowitz donkey! Lobkowitz

donkey!!" and when, in the company of Goethe, he once met an archduke,

though Goethe made a profound bow with bared head, Beethoven reached

up, jammed his hat down tighter upon his head, and, rigidly erect,

stalked by without recognition of rank. These actions of Beethoven are

emotionally tempestuous. We have our choice of interpreting them as

resulting from his personality or of determining his personality as

revealed by the deeds. In general it is better to view deeds and events

in the light of personality.

_c._ _Relation to Society and Times_

Events happen to more than the hero alone; he is a member of society.

It is necessary, therefore, to link the events of his life to the

current of his times, to fit him into the background against which his

life was played. How was he affected, what influence did he exert, what

offices or positions of trust did he hold? Often, of course, estimate

of the personality will be considerably determined by his relations

with his contemporaries. You need to bear two cautions in mind: first,

not to misjudge a man because moral or social standards have shifted

since his times; and second, not to introduce so much matter about

his relationships as to obscure the outlines of his personality or as

to relegate him to less than the chief position. Imaginative sympathy

will be sufficient to prevent the first. If you really look through

your hero's eyes at the life that he saw, with his standards in mind,

though you may have to condemn his attitude from a more modern point of

view, you will be able to see that his deeds are quite comprehensible,

that perhaps, had you been in his place, you would have acted likewise.

We no longer decorate important bridges with the heads of criminals

set on pikes, as our ancestors did, nor do we burn supposed witches.

But though we condemn Edward the First of England for the one and the

Salem Puritans for the other, we can still love both Edward and the

Puritans--if we have imaginative sympathy. The second caution requires

simply that you make your hero dominate the scene. Now this is not an

easy task when you are reviewing, in many pages, the gorgeous pageant

of an age. We can easily imagine that if Parr had written the Life

of Johnson which he said would have been so much superior to that by

Boswell, and had included the threatened "view of the literature of

Europe," the poor old hero would have been roughly jostled away behind

the furniture. Mr. Barrett Wendell paid Carlyle a tribute of the highest

kind in writing of his _Frederick the Great_:

Such a mass of living facts--for somehow Carlyle never lets

a fact lack life--I had never seen flung together before; and yet

the one chief impression I brought away from the book was that to

a degree rare in even small ones it possessed as a whole the great

trait of unity. In one's memory, each fact by and by fell into its

own place; the chief ones stood out; the lesser sank back into a

confused but not inextricable mass of throbbing vitality. And from

it all emerged more and more clearly the one central figure who

gave his name to the whole--Frederick of Prussia. It was as they

bore on him from all quarters of time and space, and as he reacted

on them far and wide, that all these events and all these people

were brought back out of their dusty graves to live again.[98]

[98] Barrett Wendell: _English Composition_. By courtesy of the

publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York City. Copyright,

1891.

Make your hero stand near the footlights, then, and take care that he be

not in the shadows of the wings.

_d._ _Rhetorical Value of Events_

From a purely rhetorical point of view the inclusion of the events in

the hero's life is important because it offers a useful structural

scheme for the writing, the chronological order. The exact succession

of events need not be followed, surely; sometimes the intended effect

will demand a reversal of actual order, but the relation in time

will be found valuable for showing the growth of personality, of

intellectual grasp, of influence upon the world. Do not, then, neglect

the active life of your hero. By presenting it you will find the task

of composition lightened, you will help to establish the personality,

and you will give to the writing the dramatic vitality that is so much

desired by the reader.

The Problem of Telling the Truth

However imaginatively sympathetic you may be in interpreting your hero,

however carefully you may try to find his life-problem, and however

well you may attempt to define and analyze his personality, you will be

confronted with one almost insuperable problem--how to tell the truth.

In no form of exposition is this problem more difficult. For we are

more moved by human personality than by anything else, more "drawn to"

a person than to a machine, more affected by the comparatively parallel

problem of another human being than by the inanimate existence of wood

and steel. Long observation and study of our heroes seems often to make

us even less fitted to estimate their worth, for we reach the state of

companionship with them where we resent any fact that does not tally

with our formed judgment, and are tempted to exclude it. Mr. Gamaliel

Bradford divides biographers into "those who think they are impartial

and those who know they are not." Partiality operates, of course, both

for and against personalities. To quote Mr. Bradford again, "Gardiner,

for all his fairness, obviously praises the Puritans because they were

Puritans, the Cavaliers although they were Cavaliers." Adulation and

damnation are the logical extremes which result from a too operative

blind spot on the retina of judgment. You must remember and cling to the

fact that no man is perfect and no man wholly bad. Much as Boswell loved

Johnson he had the good sense to write, of his biography, "And he will

be seen as he really was, for I profess to write, not his panegyric,

which must be all praise, but his Life; which, great and good as he was,

must not be supposed to be entirely perfect." George Washington has

terribly suffered in the estimates of later times because of the desire

to make him perfect. The true expository biographer will conceal nothing

that is significant, whether he wishes, in spite of himself, perhaps,

that it did not exist.

The best cure for the errors of falsity from over-love or

over-condemnation is still sane imaginative sympathy. Stevenson made

perhaps the greatest personal triumph in his portraiture when he drew

Weir of Hermiston, the dour old "hanging judge" who so outraged by his

life all the author's feelings and is yet so presented that the reader

loves him despite his inhumanity, really perceives that an honest,

even if tough, heart beat in his breast. Another safeguard is absence

of desire to make rhetorical effect. An aureole is picturesque, horns

and hoofs add piquancy; the hand itches to deck the hero as saint

or to fit him out as devil. But you must subordinate any such cheap

desire, must write with the restraint that comes from seeing your hero

steady and seeing him whole. Balance is the golden word. "This thing

is true," wrote Emerson, "but that is also true." The vulgarity of the

superlatives of political campaigns has no place in your pages.

This imaginatively sympathetic attitude must not rely on itself alone,

but must employ the other safeguard against untruth, must passionately

pursue facts, and facts, and still facts to make the conception of the

hero complete and to give the writing that so much desired quality of

fullness. The very greatest care is necessary to determine what facts

are true and what are fallacious. You are largely at the mercy of your

second or third or tenth-hand sources when you write of historical

characters. When your hero is a living person you must challenge the

report of your own senses and general experience lest you admit what is

false or omit what is significant.

The Danger of Making a "Lesson"

And when you have assembled all your facts, and have determined upon

your interpretation of the hero, take the greatest caution that you

do not try to make the life a "lesson." Presumably a child never more

earnestly desires to commit murder than when some little Willie or Susie

has been held up as a model. If Willie and Susie escape with only kicked

shins, they may count luck benevolent. Your duty is to understand and

love, not to preach about the character. You are to give us an estimate

of the great adventure of this person through life, and leave to us to

make the moral, if any is to be made. If the life has a message, the

reader will catch it; if it has not, silence is virtuous.

The Rhetorical Form

Finally, the rhetorical problem of forming your material presents

itself. First of all do not forget that all the charms of style

of which you are capable should be summoned to your aid. Since you

deal with the fascinating subject of human personality your writing

should not be dull. All too many biographical essays begin stupidly.

When a first sentence reads, "Augustine was born at Tagaste, near

Carthage (about forty miles south of it), North Africa, November 13,

A.D. 354, seven years after the birth of Chrysostom," a reader

hardly finds a warmly inviting gleam in the writer's eye; he continues

to read only if he brought determination with him. But when Mr. Charles

Whibley begins, of Captain Hind, "James Hind, the Master Thief of

England, the fearless Captain of the Highway, was born at Chipping

Norton in 1618"; or of Haggart, "David Haggart was born at Canonmills,

with no richer birthright than thievish fingers and a left hand of

surpassing activity"; or of Sir Thomas Overbury, "Thomas Overbury, whose

haggard ghost still walks in the secret places of the Tower, was born a

squire's son, in 1581,"--when he uses such sentences to introduce the

hero to the reader, the ejaculatory "Eh?" takes voice and the reader

canters down the new delightful lane where a finger beckons. Whether you

use anecdote, or quotation, or important fact, or statement of birth, or

description, let your beginning invite and not dismay.

The chief structural problem is, without doubt, to fuse the analyzed

elements of deeds and friends and interests and others into one organic

whole. If you use the chronological sequence of events, which has

already been discussed, showing how each event or group of events

indicates the character, you will have an easily followed plan. Such

a plan, or that of treating the whole life from the point of view of

the central, controlling motive, is the ideal method. If you choose to

unify the whole by showing how events, friends, interests of various

kinds, and the other manifestations of the hero's life all establish

the central motive, you will have a more difficult, though more elastic

form. With this plan you can distribute the details in the points

where they will be of most value, can, for example, indicate a change

in the hero's nature by approaching through an event, a friendship, a

turning of tastes in reading or in general interests. The difficulty

here lies in the tendency toward such dispersion of details as to

destroy unity even though to gain this is the chief intention. In the

face of this difficulty you may use a third method, which is likely

to be less pleasing, less artistic, but more easily applied. You can

divide your material under the headings "events," "friends," "heredity,"

"interests," and then can treat each group, by itself, from the central

point of view. This is a useful method, and in complicated lives it is

sometimes the only method that is reasonably easy to handle. Closely

similar to this method is that of dividing your material under the

headings of the ways in which your hero affected his times, the ways in

which he was known. Thus you might treat of the reputation as converser,

as organizer, as literary man, as public servant, as friend of the poor,

or whatever heading your hero's life affords.

Whatever method you may employ, you should remember that a human life

does not appear in separate, distinct phases, that a man does not seem

to be now this, now that, but rather all details, of whatever nature,

mingle and fuse into a unit, however complicated it may be. You should

attempt, then, to make one main thread, of however many colors it may

be woven, rather than a series of parallel threads. Note how Thackeray

neatly unites various phases and forms of interest in Goldsmith's

life,[99] so neatly that as you casually read you are not aware of the

diversity of material--though it is there--but think rather of the total

effect.

[99] At the end of the chapter.

If, then, you assume the attitude of imaginative sympathy, and study

your hero until you know what his particular life-problem was, what

his type and what his individuality, and with love and yet restraint

make your estimate, aiming at truth to character and to facts of his

life, you will produce writing that will be more than a mere scholar's

document, writing that will warm the heart of your reader to a new

personality and will be a friend of a winter evening fireside.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH[100]

[100] William Makepeace Thackeray: _The English Humorists of the

Eighteenth Century_. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston,

publishers.

"Jeté sur cette boule,

Laid, chétif et souffrant;

Étouffé, dans la foule,

Faute d'être assez grand;

"Une plainte touchante

De ma bouche sortit.

Le bon Dieu me dit: Chante,

Chante, pauvre petit.

"Chanter, ou je m'abuse,

Est ma tâche ici-bas.

Tous ceux qu'ainsi j'amuse,

Ne m'aimeront-ils pas?"

In these charming lines of Béranger,[101] one may fancy described the

career, the suffering, the genius, the gentle nature of Goldsmith, and

the esteem in which we hold him. Who of the millions whom he has amused

doesn't love him? To be the most beloved of English writers, what a

title that is for a man! A wild youth, wayward, but full of tenderness

and affection, quits the country village where his boyhood has been

passed in happy musing, in idle shelter, in fond longing to see the

great world out of doors, and achieve fame and fortune; and after years

of dire struggle and neglect and poverty, his heart turning back as

fondly to his native place as it had longed eagerly for change when

sheltered there, he writes a book and a poem, full of the recollections

and feelings of home; he paints the friends and scenes of his youth,

and peoples Auburn and Wakefield with remembrances of Lissoy. Wander he

must, but he carries away a home-relic with him, and dies with it on

his breast. His nature is truant; in repose it longs for change,--as

on the journey it looks back for friends and quiet. He passes to-day

in building an air-castle for to-morrow, or in writing yesterday's

elegy; and he would fly away this hour, but that a cage and necessity

keep him. What is the charm of his verse, of his style and humor?--his

sweet regrets, his delicate compassion, his soft smile, his tremulous

sympathy, the weakness which he owns? Your love for him is half pity.

You come hot and tired from the day's battle, and this sweet minstrel

sings to you. Who could harm the kind vagrant harper? Whom did he ever

hurt? He carries no weapon save the harp on which he plays to you and

with which he delights great and humble, young and old, the captains

in the tents or the soldiers round the fire, or the women and children

in the villages, at whose porches he stops and sings his simple songs

of love and beauty. With that sweet story of "The Vicar of Wakefield"

he has found entry into every castle and hamlet in Europe. Not one of

us, however busy or hard, but once or twice in our lives has passed an

evening with him, and undergone the charm of his delightful music.

[101] For translation, see page 296.

Goldsmith's father was no doubt the good Doctor Primrose, whom we all

of us know. Swift was yet alive, when the little Oliver was born at

Pallas, or Pallasmore, in the county of Longford, in Ireland. In 1730,

two years after the child's birth, Charles Goldsmith removed his family

to Lissoy, in the county Westmeath, that sweet "Auburn" which every

person who hears me has seen in fancy. Here the kind parson brought up

his eight children; and loving all the world, as his son says, fancied

all the world loved him. He had a crowd of poor dependants besides those

hungry children. He kept an open table, round which sat flatterers and

poor friends, who laughed at the honest rector's many jokes, and ate the

produce of his seventy acres of farm. Those who have seen an Irish house

in the present day can fancy that one at Lissoy. The old beggar still

has his allotted corner by the kitchen turf; the maimed old soldier

still gets his potatoes and buttermilk; the poor cottier still asks his

honor's charity and prays God bless his reverence for the sixpence; the

ragged pensioner still takes his place by right of sufferance. There's

still a crowd in the kitchen, and a crowd round the parlor table;

profusion, confusion, kindness, poverty. If an Irishman comes to London

to make his fortune, he has a half-dozen of Irish dependants who take a

percentage of his earnings. The good Charles Goldsmith left but little

provision for his hungry race when death summoned him; and one of his

daughters being engaged to a Squire of rather superior dignity, Charles

Goldsmith impoverished the rest of his family to provide the girl with a

dowry.

The small-pox, which scourged all Europe at that time, and ravaged

the roses off the cheeks of half the world, fell foul of poor little

Oliver's face when the child was eight years old, and left him scarred

and disfigured for his life. An old woman in his father's village

taught him his letters, and pronounced him a dunce. Paddy Byrne, the

hedge-schoolmaster, then took him in hand; and from Paddy Byrne he was

transmitted to a clergyman at Elphin. When a child was sent to school,

in those days, the classic phrase was that he was placed under Mr.

So-and-So's _ferule_. Poor little ancestors! it is hard to think how

ruthlessly you were birched, and how much of needless whipping and

tears our small forefathers had to undergo! A relative--kind Uncle

Contarine--took the main charge of little Noll; who went through his

school-days righteously doing as little work as he could, robbing

orchards, playing at ball, and making his pocket-money fly about

whenever fortune sent it to him. Everybody knows the story of that

famous "Mistake of a Night," when the young schoolboy, provided with a

guinea and a nag, rode up to the "best house" in Ardagh, called for the

landlord's company over a bottle of wine at supper, and for a hot cake

for breakfast in the morning,--and found, when he asked for the bill,

that the best house was Squire Featherstone's, and not the inn for which

he mistook it. Who does not know every story about Goldsmith? That is

a delightful and fantastic picture of the child dancing and capering

about in the kitchen at home, when the old fiddler gibed at him for his

ugliness, and called him Æsop; and little Noll made his repartee of:--

"Heralds proclaim aloud this saying:

See Æsop dancing and his monkey playing."

One can fancy a queer, pitiful look of humor and appeal upon that little

scarred face, the funny little dancing figure, the funny little brogue.

In his life and writings, which are the honest expression of it, he is

constantly bewailing that homely face and person; anon he surveys them

in the glass ruefully, and presently assumes the most comical dignity.

He likes to deck out his little person in splendor and fine colors. He

presented himself to be examined for ordination in a pair of scarlet

breeches, and said honestly that he did not like to go into the Church

because he was fond of colored clothes. When he tried to practise as a

doctor, he got by hook or by crook a black velvet suit, and looked as

big and as grand as he could, and kept his hat over a patch on the old

coat. In better days he bloomed out in plum-color, in blue silk, and in

new velvet. For some of those splendors the heirs and assignees of Mr.

Filby, the tailor, have never been paid to this day; perhaps the kind

tailor and his creditor have met and settled their little account in

Hades.

They showed until lately a window at Trinity College, Dublin, on which

the name of _O. Goldsmith_ was engraved with a diamond. Whose diamond

was it? Not the young sizar's, who made but a poor figure in that place

of learning. He was idle, penniless, and fond of pleasure; he learned

his way early to the pawn-broker's shop. He wrote ballads, they say, for

the street-singers, who paid him a crown for his poem; and his pleasure

was to steal out at night and hear the verses sung. He was chastised by

his tutor for giving a dance in his rooms, and took the box on the ear

so much to heart that he packed up his all, pawned his books and little

property, and disappeared from college and family. He said he intended

to go to America; but when his money was spent, the young prodigal came

home ruefully, and the good folks there killed their calf (it was but a

lean one) and welcomed him back.

After college he hung about his mother's house, and lived for some years

the life of a buckeen,--passed a month with this relation and that, a

year with one patron, and a great deal of time at the public-house.

Tired of this life, it was resolved that he should go to London, and

study at the Temple; but he got no farther on the road to London and the

woolsack than Dublin, where he gambled away the fifty pounds given him

for his outfit, and whence he returned to the indefatigable forgiveness

of home. Then he determined to be a doctor, and Uncle Contarine helped

him to a couple of years at Edinburgh. Then from Edinburgh he felt that

he ought to hear the famous professors of Leyden and Paris, and wrote

most amusing pompous letters to his uncle about the great Farheim, Du

Petit, and Duhamel du Monceau, whose lectures he proposed to follow. If

Uncle Contarine believed those letters; if Oliver's mother believed that

story which the youth related, of his going to Cork with the purpose

of embarking for America, of his having paid his passenger money and

having sent his kit on board, of the anonymous captain sailing away with

Oliver's valuable luggage in a nameless ship, never to return,--if Uncle

Contarine and the mother at Ballymahon believed his stories, they must

have been a very simple pair, as it was a very simple rogue indeed who

cheated them. When the lad, after failing in his clerical examinations,

after failing in his plan for studying the law, took leave of these

projects and of his parents and set out for Edinburgh, he saw mother and

uncle, and lazy Ballymahon, and green native turf and sparkling river

for the last time. He was never to look on Old Ireland more, and only in

fancy revisit her.

"But me not destined such delights to share,

My prime of life in wandering spent and care,

Impelled, with steps unceasing, to pursue

Some fleeting good that mocks me with the view

That like the circle bounding earth and skies

Allures from far, yet, as I follow, flies;

My fortune leads to traverse realms alone,

And find no spot of all the world my own."

I spoke in a former lecture of that high courage which enabled Fielding,

in spite of disease, remorse, and poverty, always to retain a cheerful

spirit and to keep his manly benevolence and love of truth intact,--as

if these treasures had been confided to him for the public benefit,

and he was accountable to posterity for their honorable employ; and a

constancy equally happy and admirable I think was shown by Goldsmith,

whose sweet and friendly nature bloomed kindly always in the midst of a

life's storm and rain and bitter weather. The poor fellow was never so

friendless but he could befriend some one; never so pinched and wretched

but he could give of his crust, and speak his word of compassion. If

he had but his flute left, he could give that, and make the children

happy in the dreary London court. He could give the coals in that

queer coal-scuttle we read of to his neighbor; he could give away his

blankets in college to the poor widow, and warm himself as he best might

in the feathers; he could pawn his coat, to save his landlord from jail.

When he was a school-usher he spent his earnings in treats for the boys,

and the good-natured schoolmaster's wife said justly that she ought to

keep Mr. Goldsmith's money as well as the young gentlemen's. When he

met his pupils in later life, nothing would satisfy the Doctor but he

must treat them still. "Have you seen the print of me after Sir Joshua

Reynolds?" he asked of one of his old pupils. "Not seen it! Not bought

it! Sure, Jack, if your picture had been published, I'd not have been

without it half-an-hour." His purse and his heart were everybody's,

and his friend's as much as his own. When he was at the height of his

reputation, and the Earl of Northumberland, going as Lord Lieutenant

to Ireland, asked if he could be of any service to Doctor Goldsmith,

Goldsmith recommended his brother and not himself to the great man.

"My patrons," he gallantly said, "are the booksellers, and I want no

others." Hard patrons they were, and hard work he did; but he did not

complain much. If in his early writings some bitter words escaped him,

some allusions to neglect and poverty, he withdrew these expressions

when his Works were republished, and better days seemed to open for

him; and he did not dare to complain that printer and publisher had

overlooked his merit or left him poor. The Court's face was turned

from honest Oliver; the Court patronized Beattie. The fashion did not

shine on him; fashion adored Sterne; fashion pronounced Kelly to be

the great writer of comedy of his day. A little--not ill-humor--but

plaintiveness--a little betrayal of wounded pride which he showed

renders him not the less amiable. The author of the _Vicar of Wakefield_

had a right to protest when Newbery kept back the manuscript for two

years; had a right to be a little peevish with Sterne,--a little angry

when Colman's actors declined their parts in his delightful comedy, when

the manager refused to have a scene painted for it and pronounced its

damnation before hearing. He had not the great public with him; but he

had the noble Johnson and the admirable Reynolds and the great Gibbon

and the great Burke and the great Fox,--friends and admirers illustrious

indeed, as famous as those who, fifty years before, sat round Pope's

table.

Nobody knows, and I dare say Goldsmith's buoyant temper kept no account

of, all the pains which he endured during the early period of his

literary career. Should any man of letters in our day have to bear up

against such, Heaven grant he may come out of the period of misfortune

with such a pure, kind heart as that which Goldsmith obstinately bore in

his breast! The insults to which he had to submit were shocking to read

of,--slander, contumely, vulgar satire, brutal malignity, perverting

his commonest motives and actions. He had his share of these; and

one's anger is roused at reading of them, as it is at seeing a woman

insulted or a child assaulted, at the notion that a creature so very

gentle and weak, and full of love, should have to suffer so. And he

had worse than insult to undergo,--to own to fault, and deprecate the

anger of ruffians. There is a letter of his extant to one Griffiths, a

bookseller, in which poor Goldsmith is forced to confess that certain

books sent by Griffiths are in the hands of a friend from whom Goldsmith

had been forced to borrow money. "He was wild, sir," Johnson said,

speaking of Goldsmith to Boswell, with his great, wise benevolence and

noble mercifulness of heart,--"Dr. Goldsmith was wild, sir; but he is no

more." Ah! if we pity the good and weak man who suffers undeservedly,

let us deal very gently with him from whom misery extorts not only tears

but shame; let us think humbly and charitably of the human nature that

suffers so sadly and falls so low. Whose turn may it be to-morrow? What

weak heart, confident before trial, may not succumb under temptation

invincible? Cover the good man who has been vanquished,--cover his face

and pass on.

For the last half-dozen years of his life Goldsmith was far removed from

the pressure of any ignoble necessity, and in the receipt, indeed, of

a pretty large income from the booksellers, his patrons. Had he lived

but a few years more, his public fame would have been as great as his

private reputation, and he might have enjoyed alive part of that esteem

which his country has ever since paid to the vivid and versatile genius

who has touched on almost every subject of literature, and touched

nothing that he did not adorn. Except in rare instances, a man is

known in our profession and esteemed as a skilful workman years before

the lucky hit which trebles his usual gains, and stamps him a popular

author. In the strength of his age and the dawn of his reputation,

having for backers and friends the most illustrious literary men of

his time, fame and prosperity might have been in store for Goldsmith

had fate so willed it, and at forty-six had not sudden disease taken

him off. I say prosperity rather than competence; for it is probable

that no sum could have put order into his affairs, or sufficed for his

irreclaimable habits of dissipation. It must be remembered that he owed

£2000 when he died. "Was ever poet," Johnson asked, "so trusted before?"

As has been the case with many another good fellow of his nation, his

life was tracked and his substance wasted by crowds of hungry beggars

and lazy dependents. If they came at a lucky time (and be sure they

knew his affairs better than he did himself, and watched his pay-day),

he gave them of his money; if they begged on empty-purse day, he gave

them his promissory bills, or he treated them to a tavern where he had

credit, or he obliged them with an order upon honest Mr. Filby for

coats,--for which he paid as long as he could earn, and until the shears

of Filby were to cut for him no more. Staggering under a load of debt

and labor; tracked by bailiffs and reproachful creditors; running from a

hundred poor dependents, whose appealing looks were perhaps the hardest

of all pains for him to bear; devising fevered plans for the morrow, new

histories, new comedies, all sorts of new literary schemes; flying from

all these into seclusion, and out of seclusion into pleasure,--at last,

at five-and-forty death seized him and closed his career.

* * * * *

The younger Colman has left a touching reminiscence of him:

"I was only five years old," he says, "when Goldsmith took me on his

knee one evening whilst he was drinking coffee with my father, and began

to play with me,--which amiable act I returned, with the ingratitude of

a peevish brat, by giving him a very smart slap on the face: it must

have been a tingler, for it left the marks of my spiteful paw on his

check. This infantile outrage was followed by summary justice, and I

was locked up by my indignant father in an adjoining room to undergo

solitary imprisonment in the dark. Here I began to howl and scream most

abominably, which was no bad step toward my liberation, since those who

were not inclined to pity me might be likely to set me free for the

purpose of abating a nuisance.

"At length a generous friend appeared to extricate me from jeopardy;

and that generous friend was no other than the man I had so wantonly

molested by assault and battery. It was the tender-hearted Doctor

himself, with a lighted candle in his hand and a smile upon his

countenance, which was still partially red from the effects of my

petulance. I sulked and sobbed as he fondled and soothed, till I began

to brighten. Goldsmith seized the propitious moment of returning

good-humor, when he put down the candle and began to conjure. He placed

three hats, which happened to be in the room, and a shilling under each:

the shillings, he told me, were England, France, and Spain. 'Hey, presto

cockalorum!' cried the Doctor; and lo, on uncovering the shillings,

which had been dispersed each beneath a separate hat, they were all

found congregated under one! I was no politician at five years old, and

therefore might not have wondered at the sudden revolution which brought

England, France, and Spain all under one crown; but as also I was no

conjuror, it amazed me beyond measure.... From that time, whenever the

Doctor came to visit my father, 'I plucked his gown to share the good

man's smile; a game at romps constantly ensued, and we were always

cordial friends and merry playfellows. Our unequal companionship varied

somewhat as to sports as I grew older; but it did not last long: my

senior playmate died in his forty-fifth year, when I had attained my

eleventh.... In all the numerous accounts of his virtues and foibles,

his genius and absurdities, his knowledge of nature and ignorance of the

world, his 'compassion for another's woes' was always predominant; and

my trivial story of his humoring a forward child weighs but as a feather

in the recorded scale of his benevolence."

Think of him reckless, thriftless, vain, if you like,--but merciful,

gentle, generous, full of love and pity. He passes out of our life,

and goes to render his account beyond it. Think of the poor pensioners

weeping at his grave; think of the noble spirits that admired and

deplored him; think of the righteous pen that wrote his epitaph, and of

the wonderful and unanimous response of affection with which the world

has paid back the love he gave it. His humor delighting us still, his

song fresh and beautiful as when he first charmed with it, his words

in all our mouths, his very weaknesses beloved and familiar,--his

benevolent spirit seems still to smile upon us, to do gentle kindnesses,

to succor with sweet charity; to soothe, caress, and forgive; to plead

with the fortunate for the unhappy and the poor.

EXERCISES

I. List the chief qualities that you find in some historic figure,

such as Oliver Cromwell, Louis XIV, Alexander Hamilton. Then make

a chronological list of the dates in the life. Compare the two

lists and determine how many members of the second list need to

be included to make an expository account intelligible. Do you

find other members which, though not really necessary, are so

interesting as to be worth including? Can you establish any

final general law about the relation of dates and qualities?

Make the same experiment upon the life of some one of your

acquaintances.

II. What was the character of Michael Henchard, the chief figure in

Thomas Hardy's novel _The Mayor of Casterbridge_, that enabled

him to write the following as his epitaph? On the basis of the

epitaph write a life of Michael Henchard.

_Michael Henchard's Will_

That Elizabeth--Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made

to grieve on account of me.

& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground.

& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.

& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.

& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.

& that no flours be planted on my grave.

& that no man remember me.

To this I put my name.

Michael Henchard.

III. Write an obituary notice of an acquaintance of yours; of the

political "boss" of your town, county, state; of Abraham Lincoln;

of Ulysses S. Grant before he awoke to his opportunities, in the

Civil War, and another of him at the time of his death; of

Theodore Roosevelt before he formed the Progressive Party and

another of him after the election of 1916. Try in each case to

give the reader a knowledge of the character and of the events in

the life.

IV. How much basis have you for making an estimate of the people of

whom the following were said, if you limit your knowledge to the

remark?

1. "To know her was a liberal education."

2. "He was the homeliest man that came up before Troy."

3. "No man ever came out of his presence without being braver

than when he went in."

4. "He never said a stupid thing and never did a wise one."

5. "He was a very perfect gentle knight."

6. "I never knew him to do a mean act."

What conclusion do you draw as to the usefulness of general

remarks about character?

V. What relation do you find between personality and character? On

which can you more surely depend for making a just estimate?

Which do contemporaries of a subject for biography usually

emphasize?

VI. Explain how the mistake was possible by which Daniel Webster's

celebrated _Seventh of March Speech_ was interpreted at the time

of delivery as a betrayal of Webster's principles, although later

it was regarded as a speech of real integrity.

VII. Explain how a man like Thomas Jefferson can be regarded by many

as a great statesman and by others, such as Mrs. Gertrude

Atherton for example, as a disgustingly vulgar person, almost a

rascal. What light does your explanation throw upon the duties

and dangers of writing biography?

VIII. What light do the following remarks throw upon the speakers? How

much justification would you feel in using the remarks as basis

for biographical estimate?

1. "I would rather be right than President!"

2. "The state? I am the state!"

3. "The public be damned!"

4. "If they appoint me street scavenger I will so dignify the

office by dutiful service that every one will clamor for it."

5. "Gentlemen, I am an unconscionable time a-dying."

6. "When you find something that you are afraid to do, do it at

once!"

7. "I never asked a favor of any man."

8. "We haven't begun to fight!"

IX. Make the outline for an expository biography of one of the large

figures of history, including the important events and showing

the relations with contemporaries and the effect upon them. Then

make a similar outline for the biography of some comparatively

humble person of whom you know who has affected a more restricted

group of contemporaries. Compare the two with a view to making

this statement: As the great man was to his large group, so the

lesser man was to his smaller group. What light does this shed on

the individual life without regard to station in society?

X. Write a life of Napoleon from the point of view of Wellington, of

Prince Metternich, of Louis Philippe; a life of Robert Burns from

the point of view of a country parson, of François Villon

(supposing that Villon knew Burns), of William Shakespeare; a

life of Michael Angelo from the point of view of an art student,

of a humble worshiper in St. Peter's; a life of Richard Croker

from the point of view of a ward boss, of a widow who has

received coal for years from Tammany Hall, of an old-time

gentleman in New York City; a life of Andrew Carnegie from the

point of view of a laborer in the steel mills, of a spinster

librarian in a small quiet town, of a college senior who is a

member of the I.W.W., of a holder of shares in the steel trust;

a life of Edison from the point of view of an artist who prefers

candles to electricity, of a farmer's wife who no longer has to

clean a multitude of lamps; a life of Jane Addams from the point

of view of a political gangster, of a poor Italian woman whom

Miss Addams has befriended, of a college girl who has a vision of

woman's larger usefulness.

XI. Write the life of a man who has just been elected to some office

of prominence, such as a seat in the state senate or perhaps to

the national house of representatives, and who is expected

by all his friends and acquaintances to make a brilliant record.

Then write another of the same man who has ignominiously failed

to meet expectations and who has come back to his home town with

a ruined reputation. Try to take the point of view of a person

who does not know that the career is to fail, and then see how

you will modify the whole account in the second life.

XII. What is the central motive in Goldsmith's life as found by

Thackeray? How does he bring out his conception of Goldsmith?

Make an outline of the article in which you will list the

various events in Goldsmith's life. Make another outline to

show wherein the character and quality of the man are shown.

Is enough given in each case to make sufficient knowledge on

the reader's part? Do you think that Thackeray overemphasizes

the sentimental appeal of Goldsmith's weaknesses and his mellow

kindness? Do you find any element of information about the

man conspicuously lacking, as, for instance, a statement of

Goldsmith's friendships, his effect upon his times, or his

beliefs? Is there any lack of imaginative sympathy on the part of

Thackeray? Suppose that an efficient business man had written the

article, would Goldsmith's lack of responsibility have escaped so

easily? In the light of your answer to the preceding question do

you think that the article is really fair?

_Translation of Béranger's poem_ (page 285)

Cast upon this ball, plain, insignificant and suffering; choked in the

crowd, through not being tall enough; my lips utter a piteous complaint.

God says to me, "Sing, child, sing." To sing, or I mistake, is my task

here below. Will not all those whom I thus amuse love me?