Relatives and debtors of great characters should not undertake to be their biographers. Few have been successful in a gesture which is usually dictated by loyalty to the dead or by piety. Most of such works are written to order by widows profoundly appreciative of their departed husband’s virtues and attainments; or by children or colleagues who would have their benefactor’s virtues perpetuated. There are a few, however, which are definite contributions to personality studies—such as George Herbert Palmer’s Life of Alice Freeman Palmer and René Valléry-Radot’s Life of Pasteur, his father-in-law; and there are others which are important personality documents—such as The Life of Olive Schreiner and The Letters of Olive Schreiner, edited by her widower, and Out of the Past, by Margaret Vaughan, daughter of John Addington Symonds.
Biographies are read for many reasons: the chief one is to be found in the nature of man; neither angel nor demon, neither beast nor god, he is fascinated by his fellow-men; and their actions and reactions, which can generally be paralleled with his own or with those of his acquaintances, become part of himself and excite sentiments in him that the record of the life of an angel or of a demon could not arouse. Then, too, it is one of man’s most dominant traits to show an untiring interest in the affairs of his neighbours, and as a rule, neighbours are delighted to show the inside of their houses, the manner in which they are cared for, and the preoccupations of those living in them. In reading biographies and autobiographies, we cherish the hope of discovering some hidden and monstrous secret, of finding enlightenment about the soul and its motives. If the subject has been a magnate in business, we expect to find an easy way to make a success in life; if he is a Martineau, we look for a formula for shouldering burdens; if the writer is a Papini, we seek for help to withstand failure.
All biographers do not use the same method to achieve their ends. All physicians do not use the same method to diagnosticate disease. Some do it by painstaking analysis of the symptoms; others by process of elimination. One biographer reveals the spiritual and physical development of the individual by narrating his conduct, relating his successes and failures and by giving detailed accounts of his forebears and environment; another takes the individual, endows him with certain distinctive qualities and then proceeds to analyse, and later to synthetise them for our approbation, admiration, or amazement.
Stories of individuals’ lives have the fascination for adults that fairy tales have for children. They engender a variety of emotional states; most of them pleasurable and consequently beneficial. When we come upon one that excites anger or disgust or anything approaching it, there is no law or convention that compels us to continue reading it. Next to poetry, biography is the most satisfactory reading for all ages: instructive to youth, inspiring to maturity, solacing to old age. Its human interest, its preoccupation with man, brings it close to our understanding and to our emotions: “Truth,” said Stevenson, “even in literature must be clothed with flesh and blood, or it can not tell its own story to the reader.” Hence good biographies are more entertaining and more edifying than books of theory or precept. It is not astonishing that the reading world should be constantly concerned with the manifestation of personality; in no literary field can such manifestation reveal itself more conspicuously, display itself more freely, explain itself more fully than in biographies and autobiographies.
Each age has its joys and preoccupations; each epoch its dominant tendencies and interests; these are displayed in contemporary writings more convincingly than in any other heritage that comes down to us, and the reading of biographies and autobiographies can do more toward giving us a clear and general vision of an epoch than any other study can do. In Plutarch’s time, when oratory was prized equally with statesmanship, the great men who were to figure in the Famous Lives were chosen almost exclusively from those whose eloquence and whose diplomacy had made them prominent among their contemporaries. “Belles-Lettres” were a sign of culture then; beautiful expression of speech an art; hence, the biographies of famous men included especially orators and statesmen.
Later, when the world was engrossed in long periods of wars and conquests; when Mars was more venerated than the Muses; and when honours and glories went to those who distinguished themselves on the battlefield, crusaders and conquerors received the homage of mankind. Their lives and deeds were set down for posterity. Then came the long years of the Renaissance; the time when men’s eyes were turned toward artistic possessions and achievements which heretofore had been neglected and which, as a result of familiarity with other countries, they had now learned to appreciate. They saw tendencies and realisations which theirs did not possess; they envied the artistic superiority of their neighbours and they steeped themselves and their children in the new beauty which had been revealed to them. The dominant passion of the cultured class—the class to which writing and reading were more or less familiar pleasures—was an adoration of art which had become the glory of the period. Small wonder that the greatest biographies and autobiographies of these times were of artists. Vasari wrote of painters, sculptors and architects and Plutarch was his model and his master.
At a time when England was free from external and internal disturbances, a draper with literary bent solaced his old age with writing, and consequently we have in Izaak Walton’s Life of Richard Hooker and of John Donne and three other friends, the first really great biography of modern times. The outstanding charm of Walton’s Lives is that they reveal the author more clearly than the subject. With the exception of Walpole and Pepys, and possibly Boswell, no biographer, letter-writer or diarist has left his measure to posterity with such completeness and accuracy as did Walton.
The period of sophistication which the late seventeenth century saw in Europe is revealed especially by the Memoirs which abounded at the time. Saint-Simon and Madame de Sévigné, Madame de Motteville and Louis XIV, while embracing all contemporary history, give minute details of the famous men and women of that period. Later, when sophistication had been replaced by frivolity, and when the morals of the great nations of Europe had lost their decorum, free love and its pleasures, irresponsibility and antinomy became the fashion. The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau testify to this fact, although his preoccupations were subjective and introspective. He was determined to unveil himself so that the features of his life would be as clear to men as they had been to God. And there was a challenge in his gesture: he would expose all his vileness and then dare any one to say “I am a better man!” He wrote his autobiography at a time when his mental balance was not what it had been; but that is one of its greatest merits. It is a common impression among sane persons that the writings of psychopaths are without value or interest. They are usually of greater merit artistically, and far more informative and suggestive than those of the equilibrated. What Rousseau did for himself, lesser men were tempted to do for others, and thus from its most famous life-history, biographical writing got its first great stimulus in France. As time progressed and artistic achievement became less important, biographies were replaced by contributions “useful” to civilisation. Biographies and autobiographies then grew less concerned with ideals and became mirrors of personalities. Always a sign of the times, they were never more so than when they shed some of their introspection, and took on universality and externalisation.
Our conception of personality confronted with modern scientific analysis becomes less specific. We can not define self, we can describe it; it is so chameleon-like that the self of one day or one year is not like the one of the day before or the year after. In view of the tremendous and increasing interest in personality due to an awakening of the sense of personal responsibility, to the increasing interest in human immortality, and to the widespread and searching study of abnormal manifestations of personality, it is not to be wondered that biographical writing which aims at revealing personality is so popular.
The time has now come when every one writes biography or autobiography, and from every corner of the earth, and from every branch of human or divine activity, there pour forth studies of the lives of prominent representatives. Musicians, poets, novelists, artisans, actors, playwrights, moving-picture stars and would-be stars, unfrocked clergymen, prize-fighters, puzzle-makers, chess players, tennis champions, dethroned monarchs, manufacturers and jazzers have followed the movement, and as a result biographies are enjoying a great vogue. Soon people will make their living, not by taking in each other’s washing as Mark Twain predicted, but by selling each other’s biographies.