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PART I: BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

PAGE

I BIOGRAPHY 15

II AUTOBIOGRAPHY 43

PART II: INTERPRETATIONS

Sherwood Anderson William D. Howells Lafcadio Hearn Mark Twain Henry Thoreau Henry James

Anatole France Sainte-Beuve Leonid Andreyev Joseph Conrad John Donne Thomas Burke Robert Louis Stevenson

V POETS 147

Alfred Kreymborg William Blake John Keats Edgar Allan Poe Arthur Rimbaud

VI WARRIORS 179

Lord Wolseley Robert E. Lee

Edward P. Mitchell Edward W. Bok Joseph Pulitzer J. St. Loe Strachey

Dr. Frank Crane W. J. Dawson

Walter Damrosch Irving Berlin Maria Jeritza Emil Fuchs

X ACTORS AND ACTRESSES 225

Eleonora Duse Charles Hawtrey Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson Otis Skinner George Cohan The Unsuccessful Actor Weber and Fields

Woodrow Wilson Brigham Young Abraham Lincoln Theodore Roosevelt

Sir William Osler G. Stanley Hall

John L. Sullivan James J. Corbett

Ariel The Divine Lady The Nightingale

A. Henry Savage Landor Eric Horne

Madame R?camier Rebekah Kohut Kathleen Norris Rheta Childe Dorr Yang Kuei-Fei

BOOKS CITED 331

INDEX 337

PORTRAITS

FACING PAGE

MARK TWAIN 74

ANATOLE FRANCE 98 Courtesy of Edward Wassermann

THOMAS BURKE 136

JOSEPH PULITZER 196 Courtesy of "The New York World"

WALTER DAMROSCH 212 Photograph by Gutekunst

ELEONORA DUSE 226

BRIGHAM YOUNG 252 Courtesy of Harcourt, Brace & Co.

SIR WILLIAM OSLER 278 Reprinted from "The Annals of Medical History"

LADY HAMILTON AS CIRCE 302 Courtesy of Dodd, Mead & Co.

MME. R?CAMIER 314

PART I: BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

But all the world's coarse thumb And finger failed to plumb, So passed in making up the main account: All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount:

Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped: All I could never be, All men ignored in me, This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

RABBI BEN EZRA.

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.

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.

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.

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