THE NEW BIOGRAPHY.
IT is not very wonderful that, amid the drums and tramplings of the last decade, the introduction of a new method into so pedestrian an art as biography should have failed to attract any particular attention. And yet we believe that it deserves notice, since the method, whether good or bad, is at least strikingly different from those previously accepted as orthodox. A capacity for judicious selection, an insight into character, and some narrative powers were formerly considered to be part of the essential equipment of a good biographer. But they are now as superfluous as grammar; and when the writer of to-day has secured a reasonably clean paste-brush and paid his subscription to his favourite press-cutting agency he feels that he has done all that is really necessary to enable him to undertake the life of anybody from a Bismarck to a Meredith. In the Victorian epoch, whose character is now so justly blown upon, time and thought were also foolishly considered to be of value in the making of a book. A decent period used to elapse between death and biography. Nowadays the announcement of the Life of the eminent Smith, in two volumes octavo, with copious illustra- tions and a preface by the equally eminent Browne, appears side by side with the nine smudges of printer's ink which your morning paper assures you represent his funeral cortege. When the biographer is afraid that his subject may gain an unfair advantage by surviving him the biography precedes the funeral. It is then called an "Appreciation," but is other- wise unchanged, except for the pages entitled "Closing Scenes," in which the subtle hand of the journalist effectually struggles to abase the dignity of death. The aim in each case is to make you read the life of the eminent Smith before you have forgotten who the eminent Smith was. And as you are not quite sure whether Smith was the author of that "Essay on the Tentative Method," which you have long been intend- ing to read whenever you had time, or merely a Scottish Barrister with a taste for declamation, you determine to put yourself right with your conscience by finding out. You instruct the young gentleman at the circulating library, who is your spiritual director in literature, to procure a copy for you at once. You override his alternative suggestion of the latest American sob-inspiring fiction ; and having attained your desire you sit down after dinner to enjoy a few hours of intellectual communion with the Mighty Dead.
As you turn over the pages for a preliminary survey, your mind is strangely recalled to the second-hand book-shops, which are the natural resort of all great and good men. In their dusty corners, which you have so often ransacked in search of some rare mathematical tract, you have sometimes seen decaying tomes which owe their existence to the obsolete pastime of " Grangerizing." This quaint amusement was once much cultivated by well-intentioned persons living in the suburbs who found time hang heavily upon their hands. They chose a favourite author and set themselves with sluggish diligence to collect and paste into volumes every scrap of published matter that had any conceivable bearing on hie life and works. For some reason, now lost in the vague realm of hypothesis and conjecture, the poet Cowper was perhaps most often the inoffensive victim of this uncanny pursuit. Upon his harmless theme they wove fantasias ex- tending into countless indestructible quartos. They ravaged the print-shops to secure his portrait in every possible position and by every possible engraver. They filled their scrap-books with views of Olney, and lithographs of the Unwins, Lady Hesketh, John Newton, the Throckmortons, and Lady Austen. They gathered together broadsheets on Thurlow and descrip- tions of eighteenth-century sofas. With an almost incredible malevolence they mutilated rare first editions to add an auto-
graph to their horrid collection. And there can be little reasonable doubt that the existence of the true enthusiast was embittered by the impossibility of discovering authentic con- temporary likenesses of the poet's hares.
It is hard to think charitably of these poor creatures ; they meant well; but they had three claims on your sympathy. As a rule they confined themselves to illustration : they did not convey the obese product to a publisher to multiply the evi- dence of their iniquity : and they did not call the result a " Life of Cowper." The volume you have been reading is Smith " Grangerized," and you have been defrauded out of the benefit of your library subscription by the pretence that it is his biography. The preface is a mass of indiscriminate eulogy. The obituary notice in your daily paper has been watered down to make the dreary "Life Story." The chapters with the vivid intimate titles—The Artist, The Romancer, The Writer of Books, The Student, His Place in the Century—are compiled of inane clippings from ephemeral journals held to- gether by a glutinous mortar of journalese.
If you are cast in the heroic mould, and somebody comes into the room occasionally to waken you up, you may struggle as far as "Smith—The Man." That is final. The title itself is almost a personal insult. It is the base coin of literature, greasy from a thousand clammy handlings ; and the contents are worthy of their heading. The chapter opens with a fervid article by One Who Knew Him Well, which originally ap- peared in "Book Sweepings." "How clearly do I remember meeting the Master in Trafalgar Square one wet Sunday morning in August, when the turrets of the National Gallery were shrouded in mist, and the manes of Landseer's noble lions dripped moisture on the glistening pavement. He wore his trousers turned up at the ends and carried an umbrella in his right hand. As he entered the terminus of the Hampstead tube he closed the umbrella and shook some drops from the ferrule against the tiles of the subway. How like him that was ! In that one moment you had the man com- plete—bis independence of spirit, his freedom from vulgar prejudice, his lack of conventional restraint. He valued the things of this world for what they were worth, not for what others might happen to think about them. To him an umbrella was an umbrella, to be used when wanted and to be cast aside when the sun shone again. No one ever saw him sitting in a train with an open umbrella above his head. Such petty self-advertising devices were alien to his austere character." And that is all. Not that the flood of eloquence from One Who Knew Him Well has ceased to flow. On the contrary he fills nine pages with the easy grace of an accomplished practitioner; but there is no further information. Apparently he was so carried away by the thought of the umbrella that he could remember no more. You visualize Smith as a nebulous some- thing, connecting an umbrella with upturned trouser-legs, and hurry on in search of clarifying facts. "Valuable as is the pen-picture left us by One Who Knew Him Well," says the compiler, "it is surpassed in interest by the special contribu- tion I have succeeded in securing from Mr. Slope, of the Chalk Farm Toilet Saloon and Temple of Fashion." From the twelve pages of Mr. Slope you gather that he shaved Smith regularly for thirty years, and that The Master had an intense dislike for a blunt razor. And that is your last conscious im- pression before you realize that the two volumes are lying on the floor, and the fire is out, and it is time to go to bed.
It is not thus that great biographies have been written or ever will be written. It is not thus that Boswell gives us Johnson at full length, his courage and his fears, his piety and his pride, his acerbity and his tenderness, his humour, his inconsistency, and his great wholesome wisdom "direct from life, not strained through books." It is not in this way that Lockhart shows us his father-in-law on the heights and in the depths. No biography on the card-index system can produce a parallel to the superb scene in the Life of Scott where, for the first and last time, the determined will that had borne down ill-health, disaster, and the "climbing shadows of buried years" was thwarted by the decay of the feeble body. You must go to Shakespeare for even an approximate equivalent. Macbeth, when his way of life had fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf, could yet oppose to the prodigies of Nature the trained pride of his profession and find it steady to the test. "Put mine armour on . . . at least we'll die with harness on our back." The discipline of years had
produced a second self to survive the downfall of the natural man. The habit of war bad drilled him to outface the weakness of the flesh : fighting was his trade, and whatever else happened he could still fight. But even that supreme resource failed Scott in the moment of his need. Only a little while before his death the imperious instinct which bids a fine craftsman to labour in his vocation till he drops, made him ask to be left alone at his desk with his work before him. But the pencil slipped from the stammering fingers, and the night came, and the task was unfinished. That is true tragedy, bitter but tonic. You need an assured touch to sound such notes on the diapason of life. No gleanings from the weekly retailers of printed gossip will serve to recapture from oblivion the immortal part of the dead, which is the only part that matters. Tlat is what we want to brace us for our own struggles; and we cannot expect to find it in the pages of the New Biography. Journalism, which suffices for the day, perishes with the day. It is powerless to influence and powerless to help.
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