Biography must be reformed, first in length, and then in substance. What most of those now rolling off the presses need is form and brevity. The man whose picture can not be painted with a hundred thousand words does not exist.
II
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
“Human life is not to be estimated by what men
perform, but by what they are.”
J. A. Symonds.
It is generally accepted that the relation which exists between autobiography and biography is so close that so far as purpose and quality of form and subject are concerned, the words are interchangeable; that is to say, the average person thinks the unique difference between the two is that one is written in the first person, the other in the third. No greater mistake could be made. One is first hand information, the other second, or even third. As Trudeau puts it: to recount the actions of another is not biography, it is zoology. Both have points in common, as all works of art must be founded on art and beauty, but the qualities that make biography great are not those that autobiography needs to achieve perfection.
In the first place, the chief merit of autobiography is to be found in veracity and sincerity; these qualities are more important than style or grammar. One of the most illuminating autobiographies of recent years is The Letters of Olive Schreiner; they are as devoid of style and as disdainful of grammar as an apache is of culture. Biography on the other hand must display literary qualities which are not indispensable in autobiography, provided truth is absolute. Cellini’s Memoirs which, in its original edition, showed the lack of literary culture of its author, is nevertheless one of the greatest books of its kind. It is not only the story of a man, it is the history of his time. Such a man and such times! If the style of the writing had been perfected by its admirable translator, it would have lost much of its charm. If the same style had been used by Boswell in his Life of Samuel Johnson, no amount of veracity and of sincerity would have redeemed it. We think of biographers as “littérateurs,” but there has never been a great biographer who was not a great artist. Autobiographers have something to say or to give to the world in the manner they know best.
The biographer must be objective; he must be able to perceive quickly, to understand readily, to grasp, gather and evaluate facts, to fuse his material into a homogeneous mass, to stamp it with style, and mix with his literary qualities a certain amount of hero-worship. Self-consciousness has no place in his work; he may efface himself as much as he wishes, and recent biographies have proved that the more he does it, the greater his achievement.
To use a well-known and often told legend, the biographer may be compared to the swan which Ariosto believed to be gliding on the surface of the river Lethe—the river for which Byron sighed and to which he called in one of his poems. Ariosto’s theory was that when man comes to the end of his life, Death cuts the thread. At the end of that thread is a medal which Time throws in the waters of the Lethe, where it disappears. Occasionally, it falls on a passing swan and nestles between its wings. Gracefully and swiftly the swan carries it to a temple where it is kept for ever. The swan of the allegory is the biographer who, by gathering the deeds and characteristics of his subject, carries them to immortality.
The autobiographer, on the other hand, must be subjective above all. His glance and his attention must be turned on himself; his critical powers and his gift of observation must be directed on his own character. As John Addington Symonds truthfully said: “Autobiographies written with a purpose are likely to want atmosphere.” A man when he sits down to give an account of his own life, from the point of view of art or accomplishment, passion or a particular action is apt to make it appear as though he were nothing but an artist, lover, reformer, or as though the action he seeks to explain were the principal event of his existence. To paint a true portrait, he must supplement the bare facts of his existence. He must reveal himself emotionally as well as intellectually. It is the emotional revelation that gives atmosphere to his story. Naturally such “atmosphere” should not exclude a certain amount of objectivity; if the writer is too introspective, his memoirs may prove stimulating and illuminating for the student of behaviour, but will scarcely interest the general reader who is not content with deductive and inductive ratiocination, but wants action mixed with sentiment.
The biographer is not a judge, but a witness; the autobiographer may be both. The former should have no preconceived idea of his hero. His efforts should be concentrated on presenting him to posterity as he appeared to his contemporaries, to himself and to those among whom he lived, acted, enjoyed and suffered. Such restrictions can not be imposed on the autobiographer who has a much wider field in which to push his investigations on personality; whatever he chooses to say or reveal must be accepted at its face value, and his judgment upon himself must be impersonal—and there are no judgments so fallacious as self-judgments. Biographies should study both sides of an individual; what he did and what he was, since his notions are determined by his personality characteristics; autobiographies need not deal with achievements which, if they are worth while, make their own publicity; the stress should be placed on the manifestation of personality—on motives, passions, experiences, failures, and accomplishments.