Part I: Biography and Autobiography
I
BIOGRAPHY
Biography is the story of a life, told by the man who lived it or by the student of it. Biography does not consist solely of a record of the events and adventures that constitute the actual and visual side of existence. It is not merely a chronological narrative of happenings, from which the reader may divine the inner and hidden qualities of the subject: it is primarily a statement of the subject’s thoughts and strifes, ambitions and realisations—and, as thoughts and ambitions condition action, behaviour and achievement, that which we call the “life” of a man flows from them. Biography presents a picture of a mind, a soul, a heart; of an environment; of successes and failures that make, or seek to make, the subject immortal. Biography strives to make the subject as real as a character in fiction; actually, it makes him as real as life. This, of course, applies to good biography, to that sort of writing which may be classed as a branch of literature, are not to the formless productions that are often labelled “biography” and “autobiography.”
The art of living has always been man’s preoccupation, and has afforded him constant and unlimited interest. This interest is increased by the opportunities he has of looking into the past, and of learning how others “turned the trick” called living. From biography man gets moral, physical, mental and emotional assistance; he sees where others have failed and why; he recognises avoidable obstacles and handicaps; he learns the value of health and its relation to happiness; and he is made to see that material prosperity does not always spell spiritual welfare. He appreciates the meaning of culture and its influence on the individual and his time; he runs the gamut of emotions that are aroused by all good biographies; he suffers vicariously, or enjoys objectively with the subject. His own life therefore becomes happier and more complete because of his intimate sojourn with a successful predecessor.
To some readers, biography affords the opportunity of gleaning historical facts without hard work; as a matter of fact much might be said about the similarity of the two arts. It is safe to presume that Voltaire would say about biography what he said about history: “a lie agreed to.” Less stress, however, can be laid on the “agreed to” in regard to biography, because whereas history is officially admitted to be true, biography, not dealing exclusively with facts, is the stepping stone between fiction and history. Indeed, the fictionist is a biographer; when he creates a type of individual, he becomes his biographer, all the more so since the type exists only in his imagination. To blow the breath of life into the nostrils of a statue as Aphrodite did in answer to Pygmalion’s prayer is a remarkable achievement, but to lay bare the human soul so that he who walks leisurely may read, compares favourably with it. When a biographer studies a character in real life, or when a man writes his own life, he has opportunity, by masterful handling of the theme, to push into the darkness characters that have been built by the fancy of the novelist, and to make them appear by contrast lifeless and stilted; for he deals with the very essence of life; it is a real heart which palpitates under his hand, real nerves that tingle and thrill. The novelist must be content to deal with the children of his mind, the biographer with the children of God.
As an art, biography is older than the invention of writing. Doubtless it has existed since the creation of man. In ancient times, it took the form of tradition, transmitted by word of mouth, which later became the foundation of legends and mythology. It has now reached a high degree of development; this is the best proof that man is unable to build his life on the present alone, or on hope of the future. He must still refer to the past for encouragement and stimulation. To begin at the beginning, the masters of the remote ages had left to the world great treasures of biographical matter; from Xenophon we know about the philosophers, especially Socrates. The life of Alexander the Great is set down in immortal words by Quintus Curtius; Tacitus has left a biography of Agricola, familiarity with which is part of the classical education; and to go back still further, to an authority that has lost none of its prestige as centuries succeed centuries, the Old Testament abounds in biographies.
Plutarch is the parent of biographical art. His Lives of Famous Men is the source from which all later biography has flown. His conception of the art is the one we have to-day, save that he, like all other biographers of antiquity, sought to include an era in his studies. There was constant competition in the importance between his subjects as individuals, and the epochs in which these subjects lived. The tendency then was to put man a little in the shadow in order that his time might stand out clearly; as a result, biographies of olden times were more concerned with principles of truth and morals than with men; they were treatises through which the writer could expound his doctrines and principles. Soon, however, fortunately for the art under discussion, writers discovered that man alone is not big enough successfully to compete with his epoch, and in the Middles Ages, biographers realised that their task should be narrowly confined between two events: the birth and the death of their subject. Outside events, revolutions, and world affairs must be reduced to the point where they could not diminish the importance of the person whose biography was written. It was then that biographies became the sort of literature they are to-day. They grew more subjective, more personal, more deserving of the definition Thomas Fuller gives the art of biography: “To hand down to a future age the history of individual men or women, to transmit their exploits and characteristics.” The man as implicit self, explicit in action, the person and his personations, are what biography aims to depict.
The Greek’s conception of personality as we understand it was most rudimentary. It consisted in the abundance of things which a man did. A recital of deeds by a chorus was an adequate reflection of the personality of a hero. It was not until Christianity put in practice its principle of self-analysis that consciousness of personality became dominant. Then it was made to embrace the abundance of things which a man is—and might have been.
When a biography is all that it should be in form and subject, it may be said to be the surest means of safeguarding a memory from oblivion. As Jacques Aymot, the first translator of Plutarch, said: “There is neither picture nor image of marble, nor triumphal arch, nor pillar, nor sepulchre that can match the durableness of an eloquent biography with qualities which it should have.” Regrettably, there are few such biographies and, judging from the output of the past two or three years, there is small encouragement for believing that we shall ever have another Boswell. Like clothing, biographies of to-day look better than the old ones, but they do not wear so well.
Biographies are written for many reasons, but the chief one is a genuine desire to help others to live successfully. Now and then an author seeks egotistically to perpetuate his own name, to identify himself with some feature of immortality, but as a rule the creation of such work is a response to the commemorative and altruistic urges. Man works, builds, suffers, progresses, thinks and hopes—then death comes before he has had time to finish a task which could never be completed, should he live a thousand years, the task of perfecting the world in the measure allotted to him. The only means at his disposal of passing on to future generations the wisdom he has so dearly learned is to write the story of his life, or to leave records and memoranda of it that some one else may write it.