Character — Ch 10c - Companionship of Books, cont.

An autobiography may be true so far as it goes; but in communicating only part of the truth, it may convey an impression that is really false.

It may be a disguise--sometimes it is an apology--exhibiting not so much what a man really was, as what he would have liked to be.

A

portrait in profile may be correct, but who knows whether some scar on the off-cheek, or some squint in the eye that is not seen, might not have entirely altered the expression of the face if brought into sight?

Scott, Moore, Southey, all began autobiographies, but the task of continuing them was doubtless felt to be too difficult as well as delicate, and they were abandoned.

French literature is especially rich in a class of biographic memoirs, of which we have few counterparts in English.

We refer to their MEMOIRES POUR SERVIR, such as those of Sully, De Comines, Lauzun, De Retz, De Thou, Rochefoucalt, &c. , in which we have recorded an immense mass of minute and circumstantial information relative to many great personages of history.

They are full of anecdotes illustrative of life and character, and of details which might be called frivolous, but that they throw a flood of light on the social habits and general civilisation of the periods to which they relate.

The MEMOIRES of Saint-Simon are something more: they are marvellous dissections of character, and constitute the most extraordinary collection of anatomical biography that has ever been brought together.

Saint-Simon might almost be regarded in the light of a posthumous court-spy of Louis the Fourteenth.

He was possessed by a passion for reading character, and endeavouring to decipher motives and intentions in the faces, expressions, conversation, and byplay of those about him.

"I examine all my personages closely," said he--"watch their mouth, eyes, and ears constantly."

And what he heard and saw he noted down with extraordinary vividness and dash.

Acute, keen, and observant, he pierced the masks of the courtiers, and detected their secrets.

The ardour with which he prosecuted his favourite study of character seemed insatiable, and even cruel.

"The eager anatomist," says Sainte-Beuve, "was not more ready to plunge the scalpel into the still-palpitating bosom in search of the disease that had baffled him."

La Bruyere possessed the same gift of accurate and penetrating observation of character.

He watched and studied everybody about him.

He sought to read their secrets; and, retiring to his chamber, he deliberately painted their portraits, returning to them from time to time to correct some prominent feature--hanging over them as fondly as an artist over some favourite study--adding trait to trait, and touch to touch, until at length the picture was complete and the likeness perfect.

It may be said that much of the interest of biography, especially of the more familiar sort, is of the nature of gossip; as that of the MEMOIRES POUR SERVIR is of the nature of scandal, which is no doubt true.

But both gossip and scandal illustrate the strength of the interest which men and women take in each other's personality; and which, exhibited in the form of biography, is capable of communicating the highest pleasure, and yielding the best instruction.

Indeed biography, because it is instinct of humanity, is the branch of literature which--whether in the form of fiction, of anecdotal recollection, or of personal narrative--is the one that invariably commends itself to by far the largest class of readers.

There is no room for doubt that the surpassing interest which fiction, whether in poetry or prose, possesses for most minds, arises mainly from the biographic element which it contains.

Homer's 'Iliad' owes its marvellous popularity to the genius which its author displayed in the portrayal of heroic character.

Yet he does not so much describe his personages in detail as make them develope themselves by their actions.

"There are in Homer," said Dr. Johnson, "such characters of heroes and combination of qualities of heroes, that the united powers of mankind ever since have not produced any but what are to be found there."

The genius of Shakspeare also was displayed in the powerful delineation of character, and the dramatic evolution of human passions.

His personages seem to be real--living and breathing before us.

So too with Cervantes, whose Sancho Panza, though homely and vulgar, is intensely human.

The characters in Le Sage's 'Gil Blas,' in Goldsmith's 'Vicar of Wakefield,' and in Scott's marvellous muster-roll, seem to us almost as real as persons whom we have actually known; and De Foe's greatest works are but so many biographies, painted in minute detail, with reality so apparently stamped upon every page, that it is difficult to believe his Robinson Crusoe and Colonel Jack to have been fictitious instead of real persons.

Though the richest romance lies enclosed in actual human life, and though biography, because it describes beings who have actually felt the joys and sorrows, and experienced the difficulties and triumphs, of real life, is capable of being made more attractive, than the most perfect fictions ever woven, it is remarkable that so few men of genius have been attracted to the composition of works of this kind.

Great works of fiction abound, but great biographies may be counted on the fingers.

It may be for the same reason that a great painter of portraits, the late John Philip, R. A.

, explained his preference for subject-painting, because, said he, "Portrait-painting does not pay."

Biographic portraiture involves laborious investigation and careful collection of facts, judicious rejection and skilful condensation, as well as the art of presenting the character portrayed in the most attractive and lifelike form; whereas, in the work of fiction, the writer's imagination is free to create and to portray character, without being trammelled by references, or held down by the actual details of real life.

There is, indeed, no want among us of ponderous but lifeless memoirs, many of them little better than inventories, put together with the help of the scissors as much as of the pen.

What Constable said of the portraits of an inferior artist--"He takes all the bones and brains out of his heads"--applies to a large class of portraiture, written as well as painted.

They have no more life in them than a piece of waxwork, or a clothes-dummy at a tailor's door.

What we want is a picture of a man as he lived, and lo!

we have an exhibition of the biographer himself.

We expect an embalmed heart, and we find only clothes.

There is doubtless as high art displayed in painting a portrait in words, as there is in painting one in colours.

To do either well requires the seeing eye and the skilful pen or brush.

A common artist sees only the features of a face, and copies them; but the great artist sees the living soul shining through the features, and places it on the canvas.

Johnson was once asked to assist the chaplain of a deceased bishop in writing a memoir of his lordship; but when he proceeded to inquire for information, the chaplain could scarcely tell him anything.

Hence Johnson was led to observe that "few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him."

In the case of Johnson's own life, it was the seeing eye of Boswell that enabled him to note and treasure up those minute details of habit and conversation in which so much of the interest of biography consists.

Boswell, because of his simple love and admiration of his hero, succeeded where probably greater men would have failed.

He descended to apparently insignificant, but yet most characteristic, particulars.

Thus he apologizes for informing the reader that Johnson, when journeying, "carried in his hand a large English oak-stick:" adding, "I remember Dr. Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow, told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes instead of buckles."

Boswell lets us know how Johnson looked, what dress he wore, what was his talk, what were his prejudices.

He painted him with all his scars, and a wonderful portrait it is--perhaps the most complete picture of a great man ever limned in words.

But for the accident of the Scotch advocate's intimacy with Johnson, and his devoted admiration of him, the latter would not probably have stood nearly so high in literature as he now does.

It is in the pages of Boswell that Johnson really lives; and but for Boswell, he might have remained little more than a name.

Others there are who have bequeathed great works to posterity, but of whose lives next to nothing is known.

What would we not give to have a Boswell's account of Shakspeare?

We positively know more of the personal history of Socrates, of Horace, of Cicero, of Augustine, than we do of that of Shakspeare.

We do not know what was his religion, what were his politics, what were his experiences, what were his relations to his contemporaries.

The men of his own time do not seem to have recognised his greatness; and Ben Jonson, the court poet, whose blank-verse Shakspeare was content to commit to memory and recite as an actor, stood higher in popular estimation.

We only know that he was a successful theatrical manager, and that in the prime of life he retired to his native place, where he died, and had the honours of a village funeral.

The greater part of the biography which has been constructed respecting him has been the result, not of contemporary observation or of record, but of inference.

The best inner biography of the man is to be found in his sonnets.

Men do not always take an accurate measure of their contemporaries.

The statesman, the general, the monarch of to-day fills all eyes and ears, though to the next generation he may be as if he had never been.

"And who is king to-day?"

the painter Greuze would ask of his daughter, during the throes of the first French Revolution, when men, great for the time, were suddenly thrown to the surface, and as suddenly dropt out of sight again, never to reappear.

"And who is king to-day?

After all," Greuze would add, "Citizen Homer and Citizen Raphael will outlive those great citizens of ours, whose names I have never before heard of."

Yet of the personal history of Homer nothing is known, and of Raphael comparatively little.

Even Plutarch, who wrote the lives of others: so well, has no biography, none of the eminent Roman writers who were his contemporaries having so much as mentioned his name.

And so of Correggio, who delineated the features of others so well, there is not known to exist an authentic portrait.

There have been men who greatly influenced the life of their time, whose reputation has been much greater with posterity than it was with their contemporaries.

Of Wickliffe, the patriarch of the Reformation, our knowledge is extremely small.

He was but as a voice crying in the wilderness.

We do not really know who was the author of 'The Imitation of Christ'--a book that has had an immense circulation, and exercised a vast religious influence in all Christian countries.

It is usually attributed to Thomas a Kempis but there is reason to believe that he was merely its translator, and the book that is really known to be his, [1910] is in all respects so inferior, that it is difficult to believe that 'The Imitation' proceeded from the same pen.

It is considered more probable that the real author was John Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, a most learned and devout man, who died in 1429. Some of the greatest men of genius have had the shortest biographies.

Of Plato, one of the great fathers of moral philosophy, we have no personal account.

If he had wife and children, we hear nothing of them.

About the life of Aristotle there is the greatest diversity of opinion.

One says he was a Jew; another, that he only got his information from a Jew: one says he kept an apothecary's shop; another, that he was only the son of a physician: one alleges that he was an atheist; another, that he was a Trinitarian, and so forth.

But we know almost as little with respect to many men of comparatively modern times.

Thus, how little do we know of the lives of Spenser, author of 'The Faerie Queen,' and of Butler, the author of 'Hudibras,' beyond the fact that they lived in comparative obscurity, and died in extreme poverty!

How little, comparatively, do we know of the life of Jeremy Taylor, the golden preacher, of whom we should like to have known so much!

The author of 'Philip Van Artevelde' has said that "the world knows nothing of its greatest men."

And doubtless oblivion has enwrapt in its folds many great men who have done great deeds, and been forgotten.

Augustine speaks of Romanianus as the greatest genius that ever lived, and yet we know nothing of him but his name; he is as much forgotten as the builders of the Pyramids.

Gordiani's epitaph was written in five languages, yet it sufficed not to rescue him from oblivion.

Many, indeed, are the lives worthy of record that have remained unwritten.

Men who have written books have been the most fortunate in this respect, because they possess an attraction for literary men which those whose lives have been embodied in deeds do not possess.

Thus there have been lives written of Poets Laureate who were mere men of their time, and of their time only.

Dr. Johnson includes some of them in his 'Lives of the Poets,' such as Edmund Smith and others, whose poems are now no longer known.

The lives of some men of letters--such as Goldsmith, Swift, Sterne, and Steele--have been written again and again, whilst great men of action, men of science, and men of industry, are left without a record.

[1911]