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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.

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.

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.

When the King of the Chewing Gum Industry and the Czar of the Chain Cigar Stores--or some one able to write better than they--shall have related their lives and revealed the secret of their success, we shall know nearly everything we need to know about the business of life. Should Gerald Chapman have opportunity to publish his autobiography before he is hanged, we shall have a document rivalling in interest the greatest biographies of the past, for he would probably be able to display the sincerity of Jean-Jacques, the honesty of Benvenuto Cellini and the frankness of Dick Turpin. There seems to be no escape from the deluge, and it is probable that no escape should be wished for. There is no harm in writing one's biography; it is the subject that one knows best and about which one is supposed to know more than any one else. But, alas, it is given to only one man in a million to be really self-revelatory. The only thing that can legitimately be wished is that the facile biographer should evince the same ardour for truth, sincerity and form that he does for approval, approbation and applause.

If only a few of the hundreds of biographies and autobiographies that are constantly appearing succeed in surviving, there will be one thing for which our age should be gratefully remembered. For, if we know what a man really feels and thinks, we know the man, and forgiveness flows from understanding.

Biographers do not like to admit flaws in their heroes, and so Miss Mayne finds excuses for Byron's faults, passes lightly over his frailty and is extremely reticent concerning the great mystery of his life. She presents the facts of the "Astarte" question as they have been made known by Byron's grandson, Ralph, Earl of Lovelace, who died in 1906. Every person interested in literature knows that the book "Astarte" was written to vindicate the character of Lady Byron, who left her husband, alleging that he had had meretricious relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and that he was the father of the child, Medora. Miss Mayne's comment is interesting: "Only pity will avail for understanding of this household and we need but know the future of the husband, the wife and Augusta Leigh for pity to constrain our heart."

Any one who would fit himself to recognise the neuropathic constitution, the manic-depressive personality, the artistic temperament, the hedonistic attitude, the religious nature, can do so by reading comprehensively Horatio Brown's splendid biography of John Addington Symonds. Possessors of the phlegmatic temperament may get neither profit nor pleasure from reading it, but all others will, and many will get nourishing food for thought.

Yet it is not this Morley, but one of his name, John, Lord Morley, who has gained a permanent position in biographic literature. The latter's series of studies on the literary preparation for the French Revolution, and his books on Burke, Cromwell and Gladstone entitle him to rank as the first critical biographer of his time.

OEdipus Redivivus will have a longer day in court than Eye Strain had and more spectators, and there is a salaciousness about the testimony elicited that the elicitors and the audience like, but the verdict in both cases will be similar.

"Compassionate in temper and liberal by inclination, Z?lide is patient only on principle; when she is indulgent and easy, be grateful to her, for it costs her an effort. When she prolongs her civility with people she holds in small esteem, redouble your admiration: she is in torture. Vain at first by nature, her vanity has become boundless; knowledge and scorn of mankind soon perfected that quality. Yet, this vanity is excessive even to her own taste. She already thinks that fame is worth nothing at the cost of happiness, and yet she would make many an effort for fame.

"Would you like to know if Z?lide is beautiful, or pretty, or merely passable? I can not tell; it all depends on whether one loves her, or on whether she wishes to make herself be loved. She has a beautiful neck, and displays it at some sacrifice to modesty.

"Excessively emotional, and not less fastidious, she can not be happy either with or without love. Perceiving herself too sensitive to be happy, she has almost ceased to aspire to happiness and has devoted herself to goodness. She thus escapes repentance and seeks only for diversion.

"Can you not guess her secret? Z?lide is somewhat sensuous. Emotions too vivid and too intense for her organism, and exaggerated activity without any satisfying object, these are the sources of all her misfortunes. With less sensibility, Z?lide would have had the mind of a great man; with less intelligence, she would have been only a weak woman."

Her death was tragic for she realised that she had failed to accomplish that which she had set out to do. She was a great character to whom truth made a profound appeal. Illusions and shams were abhorrent to her. She showed this in her dispassionate description of herself; her power of separating herself from her subject is extraordinary. Above all her predilections, she sought reality. In a world where the majority prefer illusions, it was difficult for her to find congeniality. For a while she believed that she found it in Benjamin Constant but it was transitory. She died alone, solitary in death as she had been in life.

Some day a psychologist will explain why the artistic temperament is inimical to happiness. Madame de Charri?re had health, beauty, charm, wealth, a complaisant husband, an ardent lover, an indulgent conscience and withal ability which was loudly applauded and remotely echoed, but she was not happy. Perhaps she would not have gone all the way with Anatole France who said that he had never had a happy day in his life, but she would know just what he meant to convey.

Mr. Minnigerode has at his service a keen--almost too keen--fictional sense. He seems to have less regard for truth and facts than for incidentals that make a good picture and enhance a story; and in his painstaking and careful selection of material, he uses only whatever assists him in building characters and situations. He has searched not so much for that which reveals character as motives in higher relief. As a result, we know less accurately what the four characters really were, than what Mr. Minnigerode thought they were--almost what he thought it would be interesting for them to be.

The book, however, is convincing and that may be its greatest danger. Whatever one's cool judgment may be, it carries; and this success is probably due to the many vivid scenes and to the clever, if not profound or necessarily true, characterisations.

Yet, Mr. Minnigerode's book does not contribute to the sum total of our knowledge of human personality, and that because it does not get behind the scenes; the whole action is played on the footlights and no preparation is ever visible. Characters must take their place in the scenery and are so overwhelmed with the details of the machinery that they fade from the picture. They are lost in their time. The author had a chance to work out the drives and conflicts going on back stage in the mind of Aaron Burr, for instance. But he neglected it; little is added to our real sense of what the man was. We know how he met situations, but not why. We know what he seemed to desire, but we never touch the spring of that desire. And the same thing is true of Theodosia. The picture is always charming and rendered with delightful observations and turns of expression. But none of the questions that rush to our mind as we read of her are answered. Her death is moving; yet we are stirred not by the loss of a character we have known, but merely by the disappearance of one whom we have seen move gracefully across the page.

And the other two characters, William Eaton and Gen?t seem even less real. The study of Jumel is the most penetrating of the biographies, though it may be the most blameworthy from the point of view of the "gossip urge in man." But at least the man becomes real and known, and we can appreciate the strange loyalty that bound him to his own destruction. He holds together, grows and develops, reaches the climax of his own possibilities and goes down to an end which is convincing. There is a picture of desolation in his solitude which is a literary contribution if not strictly a biographical one.

Mr. Hellman says, "The present volume has been called 'Washington Irving, Esq.,' and it is in the life of a great and lovable gentleman that we are far more interested than in the easily ascertainable achievement of the writer whose works have long been the subject of critical evaluation." If he had added to this that he had also wanted to give Irving's first biographer, his nephew, a black eye, and to include a lot of letters which Irving had written from Spain, chiefly to the State Department, it would have been a perfect description of the motive for writing the book.

Flecker was a champion of beauty. One who knows him only from his friend's "appreciation" could scarcely believe it.

Professor Osborn does not attempt to portray the whole man but a principal aspect of each life, and as such aspect is always pleasant and inspiring, he has only praise for his subjects. Some will find him too laudatory, too uncritical. But he maintains with the French author that if love is blind, friendship will not see faults; and when friendship is engendered by the admiration and veneration that every one should have for such benefactors of science, petty faults of life and trifling defects of nature are forgotten.

Thus we read of the superiority of Francis Balfour, of the impression he gave of living "in a higher atmosphere, in another dimension of intellectual space" and of the great lessons of the balanced daily life he gave to his disciples. We learn that Thomas Huxley had a delightful sense of humour, combined with a spirit of sacrifice to education which gained him popularity and gratitude. Mr. Osborn draws an interesting contrast between John Burroughs and John Muir who had in common their Christian names, their love of nature and "to a certain extent, their powers of expression"; but they were unlike in almost every other respect; and their variations are attributed to racial differences. The author's studies of ethnology make him competent to feel the influence of race and of blood, and he applies his knowledge to understanding of the soul.

The best sketch in the book is that of Pasteur, "the greatest benefactor of mankind since the time of Jesus Christ," in which love is as visible as admiration.

Ivor Brown was not so successful in his presentation of a man who has been up to his chin in the life of his time, because he pitched his song of praise in too high a key. H. G. Wells has diverted many and instructed some, but few will agree that when Woodrow Wilson lost his sovereignty over the minds of men, it was transferred in no small measure to him who would rather be called journalist than artist.

The accolade must be given to a Bishop. William Lawrence has written one of the best biographies that have appeared in America for many a year. His subject is Henry Cabot Lodge, a life-long friend. It fulfils all the requirements of biographical writings, and it does more: it gives a picture of the author: big heart, good mind, simple, sincere, sympathetic, and above all tolerant and understanding. And the picture of Lodge! With paint a Velasquez might rival it. It gives his intellectual and emotional measurements, his compulsions and restraints; his possessions and his limitations in just the way a priest should know how to reveal them.

Demand unquestionably governs, in some measure, supply in biographic literature. There would not be so many lives of prize fighters, "screen artists," singers and actors of a day's reputation if publishers did not have a market for them, or if experience had not taught writers that the public is keen to hear the details of their lives. Biographies pander to the urge that is so important to our progress and welfare: curiosity. They ward off the poisoned arrows of ennui, and they prevent the shells of boredom from exploding. Practically all biographies and autobiographies are of individuals who have "succeeded" or "arrived." Men who make failures of their lives rarely have their biographies written. It is to be regretted, for they would be helpful. We learn more from our mistakes than from our ten strikes.

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.

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.

Long before it was the fashion as it is to-day to write the biography of men during their lifetime Voltaire said: "We owe consideration to the living; to the dead we owe truth only." He foresaw with remarkable keenness the danger of such endeavour; and to-day, overwhelmed with biographies of living subjects, we deplore the fashion. There are certain truths that no one likes to be told, but that is what we must insist upon from the biographical art: truth, and more truth. Man is not big enough to look at his contemporaries without partiality, and he must allow a voice to his likes and dislikes. For instance, it would have been as unwise for Mr. Alexander Woollcott to write anything in his biography of Irving Berlin that might have made the composer appear in a light less brilliant than that of semi-genius, as it would be for a newspaper editor to write articles against the policy of his newspaper. We must agree with Sir Sidney Lee that "no man has ever proven to be fit subject for biography until he is dead."

Facts are as necessary to autobiography as they are to biography. Even when they are tampered with, as Marie Bashkirtseff tampered with those of her life, they have their importance and interest and nothing that is true should be allowed to remain in the darkness. Olive Schreiner wrote, "There can be no absolutely true life of any one except written by themselves and then only if written for the eye of God." Marie did not write hers for the eye of God, but it is the closest approach to a true life since Jean-Jacques'.

Her desire was for fame and her cast of mind made the sham, the mediocre, the ordinary things of life as hateful to her as beef gruel is to one whose taste turns naturally and by cultivation to chartreuse. She was equal to her desire, and her mental keenness and her emotional avidity demanded material which would satisfy her. Not always finding it in her surroundings, she created it and made it part of herself.

She displayed mental hunger early in life and sought to find the thing that would appease it. Through her literary interest and tastes, which were the result of thought and not of ready-made judgment, Marie reveals her mental life--a conscious life and yet unconscious. She is forever reaching toward a goal which will fulfil her intellectual hopes, and in the effort of reaching she improved her mind, added to her artistic talent and enlarged her vision. The reader who accompanies her in her journey through life must feel the restlessness of her youth, the sincerity of her demand for death rather than nonentity, the tragedy of her soul too big for her body. The inequalities and contradictions of her character could never be brought into harmony, and finally the soul won. But it is not the Marie of whom one reads that is convincing, but the creator of that Marie--just as any writer, when he shows himself as the force behind his characters--is more real than these characters.

Behind all her stage settings, her literary effects, her hunger for fame and her conscious effort to act always as one would in public, and a carefully chosen public at that--there is the writer tense, at times bored, restless, enthusiastic and depressed, giving a picture of herself, of her own sublimely dissatisfied spirit. The picture is successful in its large lines and in its small details; it reveals a mentality more than an existence, but all Marie's real life was lived unseen by the eye, and nothing would really be true of her that did not take its source and find its origin in her unconscious self.

Her response to life is such that we find it in every one of her moods: whether she is romantic, analytical, hysterical or self-possessed, she is always in a mood which is responsive to life and ready to give all she possessed to life. All she demanded, in reality, was constant change; no continuity of feeling or of sentiment was satisfying to her; joy was sorrow if long and level; sorrow barbed with keenness was joy, "... him whose strenuous tongue can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;" Marie the writer is expressed in this sentence; pain was welcome if it carried sharp sensations in its trend, if it gave her a life more full and heady, foaming from the cup.

Her idea of love was as imaginary and as unreal as her conception of life; no one but Marie could have been contented with the picture she made of her emotional response to love. She darted through her adolescent years rapidly and yet profoundly; she thought she knew all she was to know about love before she had had much teaching; her instinct and her intuition prompted her, inspired her conduct and decided her actions. Her susceptibility to impressions was such that on them she based her knowledge, and her flair for the dramatic and the unreal made her prostrate herself before the tall, blond phantom, and pretend to herself that this was love in its sublimest and most convincing expression. She reveals herself as completely in her dealings with love, as she does in her fierce demand for life; this demand became more and more tenacious as death came nearer, and her revolt and her despair as the final hour approached were coupled with the sense of futility that made it almost welcome. She asked herself the poignant questions that have troubled and upset mankind since its creation: she suffered the inevitable struggle between spiritual hope and intellectual denial. What has it all meant, and where is God? These questions were not to be answered; if her genius was nothing but a spent shadow, what was it? and why not prefer death to it? Strangely troubling questions to a young mind. Marie was one of those about whom Stephen Phillips wrote:

"The departing sun his glory owes To the eternal thoughts of creatures brief Who think the thing that they shall never see."

No student of American history can escape study of this Memoir; no one interested in behaviour will neglect it; and no one seeking instruction and entertainment can afford to overlook it. Henry Adams is Boston's asset that Washington made permanent.

Dr. Edward L. Trudeau had a powerful personality and his book reveals it. Fearlessness vied with honesty to be the predominant feature of his nature and the closing lines of one of Browning's most popular poems, sung in his heart:

"With their triumphs and their glories, and the rest; Love is best."

Seized early in life with the disease that he did so much to make conquerable, he laboured for forty years burdened and often prostrated, in the Adirondack wilderness, and founded there a health centre which radiates his influence throughout the world and which will perpetuate his name.

Dr. Trudeau had an unusual gift, and he had it to an extraordinary degree: the gift of friendship. He had exceptional power to attract people to him, to interest them in his work, and in his play. He not only attracted them, but enticed them to participation whether it was building a church, equipping a laboratory or outwitting a fox. For a quarter of a century, he radiated a benign, salutary influence throughout the North Woods, and in the latter years of his life throughout the whole country. He spoked the wheel of the juggernaut tuberculosis as few save Koch have done. His presence inspirited thousands bending beneath their burden; his courage heartened even a greater number; and his conduct inspired countless colleagues who were working at the very problem he sought to solve.

He knew the ingredients that one must have to make life a success; he knew the amount of work and play, love and worship which must be used and he knew how to blend them to make them acceptable to the eye and to the palate; but what he knew best of all was that man can not live by bread alone. Any one who does not know it may learn from the least egotistic of autobiographies.

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