Most of us really have this interest but we browbeat ourselves into a belief that a biography, especially an expository biography, must be dull. And, sad though we may be to admit it, most such biographies written for courses in literature or history, are—well, plain stupid. The lives are, to use Samuel Johnson's words, "begun with a pedigree and ended with a funeral," and the dull stretch between is a mere series of events which find unity only in that they all happen to the same person. Such writing is, truly, inexcusable; it is like the railway journey of the unfortunate soul who sees nothing but the clambering aboard and then the folding of the hands for a long dull jouncing until lethargy can be thrown off and it is time to clamber down again. Had the traveler but the insight, or the inclination, he would perceive that his journey is a high adventure spiced with a delicious flavor of challenge and reply. Just so you may find that the writing of expository biography has the charm of life itself. The patient clerk bends over his record sheet and attests the arrival, the departure, of lifeless baggage tossed from hand to hand, from car to car, piled up, taken down and set finally to rest at its destination. But you deal not with lifeless baggage but with the fascinating compound of flesh and blood, of desire and of will, that changes the face of the world. No mere matter-of-fact attitude here, but the perpetual wonder and joy at the turns and flashes of human personality. Rather than be a matter-of-fact man Lamb wisely preferred being a "matter-of-lie" man; the writer of expository biography finds that his material is of such a nature as to be more interesting even than lies. As Sir Thomas Browne said of his not remarkable life, "which to relate were not a history but a piece of poetry and would sound to common ears a fable."
Most of us find that the most fascinating study for man is Man. Not only do we believe that "man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave," but that while alive he is more alluring than anything else. We might conceivably even argue that Socrates advised "Know thyself" out of fear lest our curiosity about our fellows absorb all our effort. But so great is our fear of the formality of biography that we often belie our sympathy and think that only the large dim figures of the past, kings and potentates, who stride through mighty events, are possible for treatment. Our fear is false. Stevenson was again correct in saying, "The man who lost his life against a hen roost is in the same pickle with the man who lost his life against a fortified place of the first order." No life ever existed—absolutely not one—that was not capable of an absorbing expository biography. The true biographer never takes the point of view of the philosopher who said, "Most men and women are merely one couple more." Rather he knows that, however slight in the sweeping cycle of time a stick of striped candy may be, to the child who drops it into the gutter it is of more weight than a royal scepter. He knows, too, that the ordinary, respectable citizen, one of the "common people," though he never is subject to scandal like a villain and never molds kingdoms like the great figures of history, is nevertheless, in his quiet sphere, a fit hero for biography. He sees that to such a person the gaining, through patient years of toil, of a little homestead, is as great a victory as for an emperor to conquer a country, that to be elected moderator of the town meeting or president of the "literary club" is a large adventure. Barrie had the imagination to see that the day when the six haircloth chairs entered his mother's parlor as the culmination of a long campaign, was a day to her of thrilling adventure, of conquest, of triumph. And yet we are afraid that biography ought to be dull!
Fear of the formality of writing is often the cause of our making expository biography a mere combination of the succession of events which history shows and a few dull comments about the subject, instead of a real interpretation illuminated with the magic of sympathetic understanding. With this fear upon us we write as awkwardly, as lifelessly, as we deport ourselves at a reception where we forget the pulse of humanity and are clutched by the fear of—we know not what. Such a fear would palsy the hand of him who should attempt to weave even the treasury of facts in the following statement with an estimate of their significance. Writing of General Judah P. Benjamin, of the American Civil War, Mr. Gamaliel Bradford says:
Benjamin was a Jew. He was born a British subject. He made a brilliant reputation at the Louisiana Bar and was offered a seat in the United States Supreme Court. He became United States senator. When his state seceded, he went with it, and filled three cabinet positions under the Confederacy. He fell with the immense collapse of that dream fabric. Then, at the age of fifty-four, he set himself to build up a new fortune and a new glory, and he died one of the most successful and respected barristers in London.[90]
But with fear thrown off, with enthusiastic desire really to understand sympathetically, we find no lack of interest. To any one the terrible storm in the harbor of Apia, when ships were wrecked like straws and lives were spilled out by scores, would offer material because of the horror of the events. But only with imaginative sympathy could we write an expository biography of a humble "Jackie" on a United States boat in the harbor. With such sympathy, as we read that after the gruelling agony of long fruitless fighting against the storm the sailors of the United States Steamship Trenton, which was pounding its wooden hull to splinters on the reef, climbed into the rigging and cheered while the more lucky British boat Calliope steamed past on her way to safety in the open sea, we are thrilled with the fact that of those gallant seamen every one is worthy of record. Some quiet lad from perhaps a white farmhouse tucked into a little valley, who was honestly doing his duty and hoping for the glory of the time when he should be a petty officer, now while the teeth of death are already bared gloriously lifts up his young voice in gallant recognition of his more successful fellows of the Calliope! And yet the official record of the event would imply no possibility of finding romance in this humble individual life.
The "meanest flower that blows" moved the poet's heart; we need not be poets, but only sympathetic human beings, with the great gift of comradeship, to be moved by even the lowliest man or woman. And the objection that rises unbidden and declares us unfit to write expository biography because we have not ourselves known great men is false. Quite truly Carlyle demolishes such objection: "What make ye of Parson White of Selborne? He had not only no great men to look on, but not even men; merely sparrows and cockchafers; yet has he left us a Biography of these; which, under its title Natural History of Selborne, still remains valuable to us; which has copied a little sentence or two faithfully from the Inspired Volume of Nature, and is itself not without inspiration. Go ye and do likewise." Certainly if you face the setting forth of the life of some large figure of the past you have a fascinating pageant to unriddle, to centralize. And just as surely if you turn to the familiar figures of your home town, of your family history, and really lay your spirit alongside, you will find deep significance for yourself and for your reader. For every human being has its Waterloo. Sometimes we play Wellington, sometimes Bonaparte, but whether winning or losing we all tread the same way, and the fight is as significant to each as ever the victory or defeat of Waterloo was to Wellington or Napoleon.
The Process of Solving the Problem
With this great requisite of imaginative sympathy that sees value in all human beings, then, we set out on our chief task, to find the life-problem of our particular hero. This necessitates definition and analysis. Somehow we must find the sphere in which our hero moved, the group to which he belonged, and must then discover the qualities that he showed in the group which made him a real individual. Such definition and analysis will appear when we examine the character of the hero and the events in his life.