II BIOGRAPHY1 To the lover of books there are few more fascinating or more indispensable companions than the great Dictionary of National Biography, which, with the issue of its supplement, has just been brought (for the time being) to a close. The man who has on his shelves, and within easy reach, the sixty-six volumes of this monumental work need never be at a loss for intellectual nourishment and stimulus. Whatever may be his mood, grave or frivolous, strenuous or desultory, whether he wishes to graze, or, as one sometimes does, only to browse, he can hardly fail, as he turns over these infinitely varied pages, to find what fits his taste. Literature in our days tends to become more and more specialised; there are vast and ever-increasing tracts which are made inaccessible to the general reader by technicalities of dialect and of form; but in the written records of the lives of men and women we have all a common territory, inexhaustible 1 Delivered at the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, November 15, 1901. in its range, perennial in its interest, from which pedantry itself cannot shut us out. It seemed to me, therefore, when the promise which, many months ago, I improvidently made to address the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution was at last coming home to roost, that I might do worse than speak to you this evening for a few moments on Biography as a form of literary art. I do not propose to theorise at length upon the subject. It might, indeed, almost be said that the good biography, like the good biographer, is born, not made. There is no kind of composition for which it is more futile to attempt to lay down rules; none in which it is more difficult a priori to say why one man should succeed, and another, with equal knowledge, better brains, and a readier pen, should ignominiously fail. We can easily enumerate a number of qualities, some of them commonplace enough, which the ideal biographer ought to possess-quick observation, a retentive memory, a love of detail, a dash of hero-worship. We can also say, negatively, that it is not the least necessary to the production of an immortal biography that the writer-or, for that matter, the subject either-should be a man of genius. But no theory, either of faculty, opportunity, or environment, will enable one to explain the supreme art, indefinable, incommunicable, which could create, say, such a masterpiece as Boswell's Johnson. Still, it may, I think, be worth while to endeavour, not as a mere speculation, but by the aid of concrete examples, to realise, if we can, some of the conditions which go to the making, and which account for the charm, of a good biography. There is, I need hardly say, a wide difference, from the point of view both of the reader and the writer, between the summary and condensed record of a life in a dictionary, and a biography in the larger and fuller sense of the term. But, though the products of different literary methods, both depend for their interest upon their appeal to, and their satisfaction of, the same kind of intellectual curiosity. To the true lover of biography it matters comparatively little how much space the man of whom he is reading occupied in the eyes of contemporaries, or retains in the judgment of posterity. The interest of the life depends far more on the stature of the man than on the scale of his achievements. It must, nevertheless, be admitted that there is a peculiar fascination in trying to pierce through the gloom which veils the life-history of some of the most famous of our race. To take an obvious, and at the same time an extreme, instance, few things are more interesting to watch than the attempts of scholars and critics, like Dowden and Brandes and Sidney Lee, to reconstruct the life of a man at once so illustrious and so obscure as the greatest of our poets. |