I
IT is my increasing belief, to which the careful observation and study of years give strength, that all lives may be said to be haunted in greater or less degree by certain recurrent thoughts or influences or impressions or realizations, which, visiting and revisiting the chambers of the mind, probably from earliest years, come at last to dwell persistently with us, returning again and again like the French ghostly revenants, making free to haunt those long-closed rooms of the memory where once, it may be, they moved in the full daylight of consciousness and realization, as delights or dreads, joys or terrors of the soul.
'Two ideas,' says Pater, in writing of Leonardo, 'were especially fixed in him, as reflexes of things that touched his brain in childhood beyond the measure of other impressions—the smiling of women, and the motion of great waters.' And later on, 'He became above all a painter of portraits; faces of a modeling more skillful than has been seen before or since, embodied with a reality which almost amounts to illusion on dark air. To take a character as it was, and delicately sound its stops, suited one so curious in observation, curious in invention.'
So we seem to see Leonardo possessed always by the interest and beauty and meaning of faces, fascinated by the individuality, the infinite variety, the delicately interpretative meanings of them; reminiscent of the charm of them; visited by a hundred recurrent lovelinesses of them; preoccupied by their mystery; and above all, it seems, haunted and summoned by the lovely and enigmatic smiling of women.
To recognize this is to know much of Leonardo and his work; and even if we read no more of Pater's memorable essay, he has succeeded in these three sentences in bringing before us some impression of the essential man which is not readily forgotten, and has admitted us as it were to a partial knowledge of that great and diverse mind.
But all this is rare, very rare in biography. We write biography, for the most part, as we write history—with a leaning toward dates and successions of events.
M. Taine in the introduction to his History of English Literature makes a strong protest, it will be remembered, against this method of writing history. He cites Carlyle's Cromwell and Sainte-Beuve's Port Royal as examples of the opposite and more modern method. In these event and happening are given but secondary place; in these it is always rather the subtle underlying causes which are touched on with particular insistence. It is the tragedy of the soul of Cromwell which is so memorably recorded by Carlyle; and by Sainte-Beuve it is the intricate psychology of an entire institution which is laid bare.
It is according to this method, Taine argues, not only that history should be written, but also that we should study the literature of any nation. He then proceeds through his several volumes to his memorable consideration of English literature, dwelling repeatedly on the psychology of the English people as it manifests itself in their literature. He calls attention again and again to certain recurring ideas or ideals which manifest themselves persistently in this particular race, which haunt it almost as an individual is haunted by certain not always definite, yet strongly formative influences.
All this is not very new in substance, yet in application it belongs distinctly to modern times. It falls in with the spirit of research and inquiry so active in the past half century, and announces as with prophetic voice—for it was written as much as fifty years ago—the psychology of nations, of which we only lately begin to speak with real seriousness.
We have long admitted, it is true, a certain psychology of eras—a kind of 'soul' of certain times, or 'spirit' of certain ages, manifesting itself diversely in diverse periods. And, quite as the name of an individual not alone summons to the mind that individual and no other, but connotes a particular personality, so such wide phrases as 'The Elizabethan Age,' 'The Renaissance,' 'The Homeric Age,' the 'Age of Chivalry' do not alone designate certain ages, but in each case connote some essential quality which went to render that particular age memorable and significant. This quality is found to be in every instance dependent upon some idea or ideal which, drawing its power often from unremarked and not always discoverable sources, moulds and fashions the thought and motives of the times.
So the art, the science, the religion, the philosophy of any given age, all these do but flower from causes that have their roots deep under the surface; and he who would acquaint himself with any notable period must study, not so much the outward and obvious facts and happenings of that period, as the hidden and subtle forces lying beneath all these.
But if the true history of a people cannot be given, or the true spirit of an era be revealed by a mere citing of events, however important or carefully chosen, what shall be said of the futility of studying that infinitely more delicate thing, the history of a human soul, by method of index and compilation? Yet that is precisely what much of our accepted and well-credited biography amount to, and we have little of what might be called the more modern method. One looks in vain in the average Lives of great men for any careful consideration or analysis of the remote causes or springs of personality.
Certain biographical facts are, it would seem, expected and provided. These facts the average biographer sets out in a perfectly conventional order, somewhat as the host of the conventional inn—I hope I may be forgiven the comparison—sets out the usual table d'hôte in certain courses time-honored and anticipated. If the biographer is a well-known man,—if this be at the sign of Chesterton, or Colvin, or Birrell, or Gosse,—then there will be added, without extra cost, the sprightly light wine of easy style.
In a well-known biography of Hawthorne we have for chapter titles the following: 'Early Years'; 'Early Manhood'; 'Early Writings'; 'Brook Farm and Concord'; 'The Three American Novels'; 'England and Italy'; 'Last Years.'
In an equally well-known life of Keats,—and in lieu of something better it is perhaps the least unsatisfactory of them all,—we have, among other page and chapter headings: 'Leigh Hunt'; 'Determination to Publish'; 'Poems of 1817'; 'Margate'; 'Winter at Hampstead'; 'Doubts of Success'; 'Northern Tour'; 'Absorption in Love and Poetry'; 'Haydon and Money Difficulties'; 'The Odes'; 'The Plays'; 'Recast of Hyperion'; 'Last Days and Death.' It is true that there comes a whole chapter at the very last, under the promising title, 'Character and Genius'; but reading it hopefully, one finds but talk of 'self-control,' 'sweetness of disposition' 'sympathy,' 'good sense,' 'honor,' 'manliness'—with a somewhat hackneyed reference to the Greek purity and the mediæval richness of imagery which characterize Keat's poetry, and a few words concerning his influence on a later age.
Now, considering the vivid and marvelous personality of the man, if these be not the bare bones and laboratory skeletons of biography, then I do not know bare bones or skeletons when I have sight of them.
No one questions that these are helpful if one is studying anatomy; that they may even be admitted as necessary to an understanding of that timely temple of abode in which the fiery spirit for a while took up its residence; but to call this a 'life' of the man, which gives so little knowledge of his spirit's habits of living!
If I turn to a little volume of Shelley on my table, where only eighteen small pages out of five hundred and ninety-two are devoted, as it happens, to the same subject, and only at that to the closing incident of Keats's career,—his untimely death,—I find him spoken of in somewhat more adequate fashion.
I shall not quote the words metred out in verse, as they stand in the volume, but shall ask to be allowed to set them down as if they were mere running prose, as follows:—
For he is gone where all things wise and fair descend.
So much for the sense of shining and resplendent peace that comes with the going of so large a spirit! But let us read on. It is Urania now who is addressed concerning the poet:—
Thy youngest dearest one has perished; thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last. The bloom whose petals, nipt before they blew, died in the promise of the fruit, is waste; the broken lily lies—the storm is overpast. The quick Dreams, the passion-winged ministers of thought, who were his flocks, whom near the living streams of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught the love which was its music, wander not, wander no more.... And one with trembling hand clasps his cold head, and fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries: 'Our love, our hope, our sorrow is not dead; see on the silken fringe of his faint eyes, like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies a tear some Dream has loosened from his brain.' ... And others came,—Desires and Adorations, Winged Persuasions, and Veiled Destinies, Splendors and Glooms and glimmering Incarnations of hopes and fears and twilight Phantasies ... all he had loved and moulded into thought from shape, and hue and odor and sweet sound, lamented Adonaïs.... He is made one with Nature; there is heard his voice in all her music, from the moan of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird; he is a presence to be felt and known in darkness and in light, from herb and stone, spreading itself where'er that Power may move which has withdrawn his being to its own; ... he is a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely; ... he is gathered to the kings of thoughts who waged contention with their times' decay, and of the past are all that cannot pass away.
And this further, this little bit about the poet's grave:—
Here pause, these graves are all too young as yet, to have outgrown the sorrow which consigned its charge to each; and if the seal is set, here, on one fountain of a mourning mind, break it not thou!... From the world's bitter wind seek shelter in the shadows of the tomb. What Adonaïs is, why fear we to become?
It will be objected that this is not biography at all, but poetry, and very famous poetry at that. I am aware, full aware of it. I have only to remark that, since there is a beating upon the gates and the starved people demand bread and there is none, 'Why then, let them eat cake!' There is perhaps more pure essence of biography in lines like these, which purport not to be biography at all, than in any pompous three-volume 'Life,' which comes decked in scarlet, and heralded by the trumpet-blasts of publishers well versed in the psychology of advertising.
Or take all these supreme lines away and leave me but that one by the same hand, 'The soul of Adonaïs like a star,' and I am not sure that I am not richer by that, than by many biographical chapters.