ARTICLE III-A BIOGRAPHER AT WORK. AN author who was about giving to the world the memoirs of a friend, not possessed of any singular claim upon public interest, gravely announced in the preface to his work that his friend was par excellence a biographer, and that, in his opinion, to have written a readable memoir constituted a sufficient reason why the author's own life should in turn be written. Prior wrote the life of Goldsmith and that of Burke; therefore, argues our author, it is proper that I should write the life of Prior, and, therefore, he was too modest to add, but surely too logical to deny, some day my life must be written. If this opinion is to be accepted, one shudders at the endless entail of biographies! Nevertheless, in full view of all the consequences, we propose to step into line, looking before and after like a wise man. We know a person who has written a biography, and we propose to write his life, but as we intend to account for so much of it only as was occupied in the biogra phic task, we rigidly demand of the biographer, whom by this act we entail upon ourself, that he shall preserve the same ratio, and write only that chapter of our memoirs which would cover the time spent in preparation of this essay. In this way we are most ingeniously reducing one line of biographic debt, and though it is metaphysically impossible that the score should ever be wholly wiped out, yet practically we are entailing only a pitiful and absurdly minute ecumbrance upon the last comer, whenever he shall appear. For observe, our friend wrote a life; we write so much of his life as wrote that; our biographer-for we cannot help ourself, modest as we arewill write a still smaller segment of our life; his biographer just sits down for ten minutes, say, writes a few lines, and is free by the contract; his biographer, again—we mean the biographer of this last biographer-does his part, stans in uno pede as it were, in the spare minute which every one can easily find in the course of his life, and with the happy consciousness of having done his duty easily, he cheerfully submits to have his life taken for that minute, and leaves a memorandum to the effect. It is positively exhilarating to see this mountain of debt dwindling so fast to a grain of sand, and in the full glow of the encouraging prospect we begin our task, promising our readers and our future biographer to be as brief as possible, and promising our subject, for we must not forget that side of the obligation, that we shall be governed in the proportions of our Article, by a due regard for the time and labor which he expended on his hero. It is not necessary to recount the circumstances which imposed the task upon him. Suffice it to say, that he found himself in some sort compelled to undertake a work from which he shrank, and for which he felt no special aptitude. He had used his pen somewhat in other kinds of literary labor, so that he was not wholly without confidence in attempting this; but, the nature of the work made him draw back. He was called upon to write the life of one whom he had known intimately, had loved, and honored. His friend was not a person of public repute, whose life he would only need to sketch lightly, and the public would recognize the portrait, filling it in with their own impressions; he was intimately known only to a few, and not having left any published writings, indicative of his character, would inevitably soon be forgotten except by those few. The task, then, which the biographer assumed was to satisfy first his friends' associates, by a truthful record of the life which they had known with different degrees of intimacy, and next to present to outside people who might be approached, an interesting and complete account of one whom they never had known. The question here arose-how far was the tone of the biography to be taken from that prevailing in the class with which it would be numbered? His friend had been distinctively a man of religious character and Christian enterprise. The biographer saw that it was amongst religious people that he must look chiefly for his readers, and among religious memoirs that his book would lie. But he felt a repugnance toward this class of literature; he had come to regard it as pervaded by an unhealthy tone; it seemed to him almost an inevitable charac teristic of religious memoirs that they should treat religion as an unlovely and unnatural element in life, almost in fact as a disease. There was a certain method in their dissection of the spirit, as if they wished to disprove Christ's words, and show that it was possible to tell, of one born of the Spirit, whence that Spirit came and whither it went. Those which recorded mainly religious aspirations and regrets seemed to him as senseless as ordinary biographies would be which should give as indications of life a daily memorandum of the condition of a man's lungs as tested by the stethoscope; and besides, how different these emotional expressions to the man himself, quick under some excitation, and the same expressions read years afterwards it may be by one unable to reproduce the ligaments which bound them to a living soul. "Is there not something unnatural," he once said to us, "in religious biography at all, as a distinctive class? Or ought not the distinction to be made a broad one, throwing all lives into two great classes, according as they do or do not spring from religious principle? Biography of scientific men, of literary men, of statesmen, of artisans there may be, lives even of eminent shoemakers, and, perhaps, according to a very recent school, lives of men who have once been boys; but religion is not an acquisition like scientific or political knowledge, nor is eminence in it analagous to eminence in some art or trade; it is vital, not accidental." While we confessed to a common prejudice with our friend, we pointed out to him that there must be such a distinct class, since those who by reason of strong Christian purpose rise high above the level of ordinary Christian society are by this very exaltation eminent people, marked, attracting attention, and therefore such as the world wishes to know further about when they are dead, apart from any eminence which they may have attained in human pursuits; but that, in writing the lives of such men, biographers made the mistake of treating religion as an end to be attained, instead of a vital power at work in the soul. Indeed, we added, the very failure which you affirm of this class of writings demonstrates the high place in art which the class occupies. The easiest life to write is that which is most outward; a life of adventure is the lowest form of biography. The hardest life to write is that which demands a record because of its strong character; and the highest form of biography is that which undertakes to display character through a representation of those forms which in actual life best contain and exhibit it. And what order of character presents to the biographer more glorious opportunities and greater perplexities than that which. displays a new force revolutionizing it? The meshes of a man's inner life are not easy to trace, and when the great Weaver is busy in weaving the excellent pattern of Christ, the task of tracing becomes more difficult. Here let us digress for a moment to observe how excellent an opportunity exists for creating a class of religious works healthy, instructive, and yet very interesting-three desired elements which Sunday school librarians find it so hard to supply. If the writers of lives of religious men were to study for their task by writing novels, they would discover some valuable principles of the biographic art. The highest order of novels may be said to be that which creates men and women, and suffers their characters to work out their own destiny. There are surely but few general readers who cannot be won to the study of individual growth as gradually unfolded by the novelist's art. Why should not biography borrow the same aid; and taking the life of some person, quite unknown to fame, but having a strongly marked character, set forth the growth of that character under its changing experience of life, sketching with such fullness as need be the world of nature and society in which it moved, and showing how it was renewed and sanctified by Divine grace? Our biographies are too bald. We are told, perhaps, that the subject was born in New York; and as many persons have been in New York, nothing more is said about the city. But why should not a little sketch be given of the city and city life, as seen behind the human figure? He goes to Yale, and that intense little world of which he becomes a force, attracting and attracted, is reduced to the merest shadow; and so throughout the book-the hero is the only figure, and for want of more substance in the accompanying shadow, himself loses so much of his individuality as is the result of palpable connexion with men and things. We did not at the time suggest this to our friend, but in planning his work he adopted some such theory, from a conviction that it was chiefly as a study of character that the life which he was to write would possess any literary value or any influence. Among our friend's papers which have fallen to our use in preparing this sketch, we find this paragraph, copied from Carlyle's essay on Burns, and marked "This must be remembered if I ever have to write a biography":-" If an individual is really of consequence enough to have his life and character recorded for public remembrance, we have always been of opinion that the public ought to be made acquainted with all the inward springs and relations of his character. How did the world and man's life from his particular position represent themselves to his mind? How did coexisting circumstances modify him from without? How did he modify these from. within? With what endeavors and what efficacy rule over them? With what resistance and what suffering sink under them? In one word, what and how produced was the effect of society on him? and what and how produced was his effect on society?" There is another note appended, evidently much later, judging from the color of the ink and the style of handwriting:"Can one use the scalpel on his familiar friend?" He shrank instinctively from pursuing such a course with one whose death was still fresh in his memory. It requires no sacrifice of feeling to analyze most minutely the character of one's imaginary hero. There the intellect feels no restraint; but to grope about in the heart of a dead friend, no matter how pure one may feel it to be, creates a revulsion of feeling. Yet the analysis must be made, and happily for him, with his interest in psychology, there existed a continual restraint upon a mere prying intellectualism in the reverence which he felt for the dead, and the sense of his own inferiority in its presence. The analysis must be made; yet it is not the highest art, and so our friend felt, merely to reproduce it in the same form. He must analyze, but the reader ought to be supplied as far as possible with the same material from which to form his own analysis; hence the aim of the biographer was to cast the life in his book in a structural form. He was obliged to tear down, in order that he might rebuild after the same pattern in miniature. Thus he analyzed the world about his subject, and selected representative forms which should as forms of art suit the requirements of his work, and as forms of nature suggest |