From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life

by A. T. Mahan

For the writing of biography I had formed a theory of my own, a guiding principle, closely akin to the part which sea power had played in my treatment of history. This leading idea was not intended to exclude other points of view or manners of presentation, but was to subordinate them somewhat peremptorily. As defined to myself, my plan was to realize personality by living with the man, in as close familiarity as was consistent with the fact of his being dead. This was to be done first, for myself, as the necessary prelude to transmission to my readers. When there remains a huge mass of correspondence, by one as frank in utterance and copious in self-revelation as was Nelson, the opportunity to get on terms of such intimacy is unique, one-sided though the communication is. Besides, companions and subordinates have left abundant records of their association with him, which constitute, as it were, the other side of conversation; relieving the monologue of his own letters. The first thing in order is to know the living man; and it seemed to me that, with such materials, this could be accomplished most fully by steeping one's self in them, creating an environment closely analogous to the intercourse of daily life. I believed that passive surrender to these impressions, rather than conscious labored effort, would gradually produce the perceptions of immediate contact, to the utmost that the nature of the case admitted. Johnson doubtless was right in naming personal acquaintance as chief among the qualifications of a biographer; failing that, one must seek the best substitute. By either method the conception of character and temperament is formed; its reproduction to readers is a matter of power of expression, and of capacity to introduce aptly, here and there, the minute touches by which an artist secures likeness and heightens effect.

Whatever the worth of this theory, it was due in large measure to revulsion from a form of biography, to me always displeasing and essentially crude, which gives a narrative of external life-events, disjointed continually by letters. Profuse recourse to letters simply turns over to the reader the task which the biographer has undertaken to do for him. Perhaps the biographer cannot do it. Then he had better not undertake the job. A collection of letters is one thing, a biography another; and they do not mix well when a career abounds in incident. Letters are material for biography, as original documents are material for history; but as documents are not history, so letters are not biography. The historian and biographer by publishing virtually contract to present their readers with a digested, reasoned whole; the best expression, full yet balanced, that they can give of the truth concerning a period, or a man. It is a labor of time and patience, and should be also of love; one which the reader is to be spared, on the principle that a thousand men should not have to do, each for himself, the work the one writer professes. It is no fair treatment to tumble at their feet a basketful of papers, and virtually say, "There! find out the man for yourself."

The interest of lives, of course, varies, and with it the opportunity of the biographer. I do not mean in degree, which is trite to remark, but in kind, which is less recognized. There are men the value of whose memory to their race lies in their thought and words, whose career is uneventful. Yet even with them the impression of personality is not as vividly produced by masses of correspondence as it may be by the petty occurrences of daily life, which for them are the analogues of the stirring incidents that mark the course of the man of public action, statesman or warrior. The reason is plain; the character of few rises to the height of their words, written or spoken. These show their wisdom, or power, and are uplifting; but their shortcomings, too, have a virtue. We fight the better for appreciating that victors have known defeat. The supreme gift of biography to mankind is personality; not what the man thought or did, but what he was. Herein is inspiration and reproof; motive force, inspiring or deterrent. If nothing better, mere recognition, or exultation in an excellence to which we do not attain, has a saving grace of its own.

For the purposes of his biographer, Dr. Johnson scarcely left London. Beyond a brief visit to Paris, only a tour through the Hebrides; this an event so colossal in its elevation above the flat level of his outward existence, like the church towers in a Dutch landscape, that it is treated as a thing quite apart, has a volume to itself, severed from its before and after. Boswell gives letters, certainly, and many; yet, in the matter of character portrayal, what are they alongside of the talk? And also, more pertinent, what to Boswell was even the talk, compared with the intercourse to which the talk was incident? In this he immersed himself and his strong receptive powers, absorbing the impression which he has so skilfully reproduced. Such apprehension as Boswell thus gained for himself is no neutral acquirement; it is a working force, instinctively selective from that on which it feeds, and intuitive in its power of arrangement. To copy his result is futile. Like Nelson, there is but one Boswell; but it may be permitted to believe that lesser men will profit to the extent of their capacities by adopting his method. This possibly he never formulated, in that again proving his genius, the unconscious faculty of a very self-conscious man; but I conceive the process to have been, first know your subject yourself thoroughly by close contact and sympathy, and then so handle your material as to bring out to the reader the image revealed to you.

This is, in a measure, a plea for picturesque treatment of biography and of history; not by gaudy coloring and violent contrasts, striving after rhetorical effect, but in the observance of proportion, of grouping, of subordination to a central idea; not content with mere narration, however accurate in details. A narrative which fails in portrayal, in picturesque impression, is not accurate; and a biography which presents a man's thoughts and acts, yet does not over and above them fashion his personality to the reader, is a failure. How much conscious effort may be necessary to the due handling of materials, I certainly cannot undertake to say; but persuaded I am that the utmost results possible to any particular man can be attained only by passive assimilation, and that so they will be attained to the measure of his individual capacity. By such digestion a theme apparently dry may be quickened to interest. Though not a lawyer, nor a student of constitutions, I found Stubbs's Constitutional History of England fascinating. I have not analyzed my pleasure, but I believe it to have been due to portrayal; to arrangement of data by a man exceptionally gifted for vivid presentation, who had so lived with his subject that it had realized itself to him as a living whole, which he successfully conveyed to his readers. There is no disjointment. The result is a great historical picture; or a biography, of law as a benevolent developing personality, moving amid the struggles and miseries of the human throng, healing and redressing.

To The Life of Nelson I applied the idea of this method, which I thought to be helped rather than hindered by my warm admiration for him, little short of affection. I had faith in the power of attachment to comprehend character and action; and because of mine I believed myself safer when necessary to censure. I grieved while I condemned. I was sure also that, however far below an absolute best I might fall, the best that I could do must thus come out. Amid approval sufficient to gratify me, I found most satisfaction in that of a friend who said he felt as if he had been living with my hero; and of another who told me that after his day's work, which I knew to be laborious, he had refreshed his evenings with Nelson. In the first edition I fell into two mistakes of some importance, as well as others in small details, the effect of which was to confirm me in my theory; for while they were blemishes, and needed correction, they did not, and do not, to my mind affect the portrait—the conveyance of true personality.

Of these errors the most serious, regarded as a fault, was an inadequate study of Nelson's course at Naples in 1799, so sharply challenged at that time and afterwards. I recognized the justice of a criticism which alleged that I had not sufficiently examined the other side of the case, as presented by Italian authors. This I now did, rewriting my account for the second edition. I found no reason to change my estimate of Nelson's conduct, but rather to confirm the favorable aspects; but what was more instructive to me was that even so large an oversight did not when remedied affect the portrait. The personality remained as first conceived; Nelson had acted in character. The same was substantially true of a more pregnant incident, the discovery of a number of his letters to his wife, which had escaped the diligent search made by the editor of his correspondence, Sir Harris Nicolas. After lying concealed for the half-century between Nicolas and myself, they turned up shortly after my book was in print. Here was more self-revelation; how might it modify my picture? The event was ushered in with a great flourish of trumpets, the walls of Jericho were about to fall, and I own I felt anxious. Some of the letters were published; permission to see the others was refused me. As these have not since been given to the world, I fancy that they sustain the opinion expressed by me on those that were; that beyond emphasizing somewhat his hardness to Lady Nelson during the period of his growing alienation, they add little to the impression before formed. A slight touch of the brush, another line in the face, that is all.

The question of Nelson's action at Naples was brought forward in a way which required from me some controversial writing. To this I have no intention of alluding here, beyond stating that up to the present my confidence has not been shaken in my defence of the main lines of his conduct, clearing him of the deceit and double-dealing alleged against him. I say this because there may be some who have thought me silenced by argument, in that I have not seen fit to rise to such crude taunts as that, "After this Captain Mahan will not undertake," etc. What Captain Mahan will or will not do is of no particular importance; but when the repute of such an one as Nelson is at stake, burdened by the weight of calumny laid upon him by Southey's ill-instructed censures, it is right to repeat that nothing I have seen since I last wrote, about 1900, has appeared to me to call for further answer.

The Life of Nelson, and The War of 1812, of which I have already spoken, remain my last extensive works. In the interval between them, 1897–1902, I was engaged mostly in occasional writing, for magazines or otherwise. From time to time these papers have been collected and published, under titles which seemed appropriate. Concerning them, for the most part, there is one general statement to be made. With few exceptions, they have been written to order. Partly from indisposition to this particular activity, partly from indolence, ultimately from conviction that editors best know—or should know—what the public want, I have left them to come to me. When expedient, I have taken a subject somewhat apart from that suggested, but usually akin. Speaking again generally, the field of thought into which I have been thus drawn has been that of the external policy of nations, and of their mutual—international—relations; not in respect to international law, on which I have no claim to teach, but to the examination of extant conditions, and the appreciation of their probable and proper effect upon future events and present action. In conception, these studies are essentially military. The conditions are to my apprehension forces, contending, perhaps even conflicting; to be handled by those responsible as a government disposes its fleets and armies. This is not advocacy of war, but recognition that the providential movement of the world proceeds through the pressure of circumstances; and that adverse circumstances can be controlled only by organization of means, in which armed physical power is one dominant factor.

In direct result from the line of thought into which I was drawn by my conception of sea power, and which has inspired my subsequent magazine writing, I am frankly an imperialist, in the sense that I believe that no nation, certainly no great nation, should henceforth maintain the policy of isolation which fitted our early history; above all, should not on that outlived plea refuse to intervene in events obviously thrust upon its conscience. The world of national activities has become crowded, like the world of professions; opportunity, consequently, has diminished, and possibilities must be cultivated and husbanded. This is the primary duty of a government to its own people and to their posterity. But there are other duties which must be accepted, even though they entail national sacrifice, because laid at the nation's door, like Cuba, or forced upon its decision, like the Philippines. I see too clearly in myself the miserable disposition to shirk work and care, and responsibility, to condone the same in nations. I once heard a preacher thus parody effectively the words of the prophet—"Here am I, send him!" And I have heard attributed to the late Mr. John Hay an equally telling allusion to certain of our moralists, who would discard the Philippines on the score of danger to the national principles. Said a pious girl, "When I realized that personal ornaments were dragging my immortal soul to hell, I gave them to my sister." Still less, let us hope, will one of the wealthiest of nations, almost alone in the possession of an abundant surplus income, desert a charge on the poor plea of economy; or so far distrust its fate, as to turn its back upon a duty, because dangerous or troublesome. If the political independence of the Philippine Islands bid fair to result in the loss, or lessening, of the safeguards of personal freedom to the private Philippine islander, the mission of the United states is at present clear, nor can it be abandoned without national discredit; nay, national crime. Personal liberty is a greater need than political independence, the chief value of which is to insure the freedom of the individual. Similarly, not only for the sake of its own citizens, but for the world at large, each country should diligently watch and weigh current external occurrences; not necessarily to meddle, still less to forsake its proper sphere, but because convinced that failure to act when occasion demands may be as injurious as mistaken action, and indicates a more dangerous condition, in that moral inadequacy means ultimately material decline. When the spirit leaves the body, the body decays.