MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IN these days, when poetry has become esoteric and fiction abstruse, the common reader turns to biography, hoping to find therein both instruction .and pleasure. This increasing demand has created an increasing supply; every week a motley crowd of biographies jostle each other in the market, differently arrayed. Some of them are serious works of historical research; others little more than romances based upon conjectural facts; others provide their authors with an opportunity to display their ingenuity or to expound a personal point of view. In all this welter, the purposes and principles of pure biography tend to be obscured. A biography should be a portrait of an individual set in a given environment; it should be true, life-like and composed as a work of literature. When an author disregards any of these three principles, he is not writing pure biography, but something else. Of all branches of literature, biography has suffered most from inappropriate or irrelevant motives. In its very origin it was inspired by the motive of commemoration; the head of a tribe or family died, and his survivors felt it incumbent upon them to commemorate in monumental form his virtues and achieve- ments; much impure biography has been due, to the pious instinct to exaggerate the merits, and conceal the defects, of the illustrious dead. A second subversive motive has been the didactic motive; an endeavour has persisted to treat the lives of individuals either as examples of virtue or as cautionary tales; we have had the old hagiographies and martyrologies as well as the " Saintly Lives Series " of the nineteenth century. As a reaction against these two motives came the ironical school of biography, tentatively introduced by Froude, and brought to a high level of polish by Lytton Strachey. Every biography must, to some extent, be a product of collaboration between the author and his subject; but impure biography results if the subject be handled as a victim, or if the author use his material to convey, his own superior enlightenment or acumen. No pure biography can be written with a sneer.
I have, during the last few months, been re-reading Plutarch's Lives. The father of biography was not, I readily admit, exempt from the fault of treating his characters less as individuals than as types of vice or virtue. In his Morczlia he contends that it is an excellent practice, when confronted with the vicissitudes of fortune, to set before ourselves the examples of the great men of the past. " What," we should ask ourselves. " would Plato have done. in this case ? What would Epanieinondas have said ? How would Lycurgus have conducted himself, or Agesilaus ? " I confess that it is but slight guidance to me, when filling in my income-tax returns, to reflect what amount Epameinondas would have felt justified in inserting under the heading of professional entertainment; his hospitality was sparse. Plutarch, moreover, would have been ill-attuned to the age of the common man. " To please the multitude," he wrote, " is to displease the wise." The mob," he writes again in his life of Nicias, " can have no greater honour shown to them by their superiors than not to be despised." He was essentially a Greek who believed that the Romans of the great age were the inheritors of Greek virtue. Again and again does he refer to Hellenic " nobility," or eugeneia, as contrasting with the lax habits of those of lesser breed. He was shocked that Alexander should have been persuaded to adopt the Persian dress, thereby rendering himself a foreign idol, an agalnia barbarikon. It is with splendid scorn that he denounces the Spartan Antalcidas, who consented to become a courtier in attendance on ArtaxerxeS, and " danced away among the Persians the renown of Leonidas."
What is so enjoyable about Plutarch, is that, with his mastery of vivid narrative, with his passionate interest in the significant detail, he manages to render the ancient world a living, bustling, humming reality. As a little boy at Chaeronea he Would play knuckle-bones around the base of the stone lion which still dominates the plain; when grubbing for eels in the marshes of the Cephissus he would find rusted swords and bucklers, the relics of Sulla's victory over Mithridates. Legends must still have lingered in the vineyards of his native city of that fierce bight when Philip of Macedon, drunk with the orgy of victory, reeled and slithered over the naked corpses of the Athenians, hiccupping imprecations against Demos- thenes. To us, across the gulf of time, Plutarch seems almost a contemporary of the contests that he relates. Had not his grandfather told him. how he had been admitted by Philotas into the kitchen of Alexandria and seen the great boars roast- ing on spits in readiness for the banquet of Antony and Cleopatra ? Had he not with his own eyes seen Spartan youths beaten to death before the altar of Artemis Orthia ? Had he not been shocked to observe the lavish monument erected by Harpalus to the memory of the courtesan Pythonice, a few yards only from the sacred way ? Had he not seen the spear of Agesilaus preserved at Sparta, the monument to Cato at Utica, the great statue of Marius at Ravenna ? His description of the vale of Tempe, with its meadows and plane trees, might have been written by any traveller of today. The dust rises over his great battle-fields and the armour of hypaspists flashes from the dry hills. * * " I began," confesses Plutarch in his introduction to the Timoleon, " to write these ' Lives' for the sake of others, bu I find that I am continuing the work and enjoying it for m own sake. I use history as a looking-glass, and I -strive some how to shape and deck my life according to the virtues therei reflected." Plutarch belonged to the eclectic school o philosophy and believed that the conjunction of Greek idealism and Roman order. provided the best of all ethical rules. He sought in his biographies to show the young the rewards of virtue and the penalties of vice and to inculcate what he called " the finest of all lessons, how to obey and how to command." Yet, since he considered glory to be " the image of virtue," he was unable to conceal his admiration even for those of whom he disapproved. He scarcely tried to hide his affection for Alcibiades or his esteem for the mighty resilience of Antony. He is above everything a human author. Sententious always, given to moral platitudes, apt to make immense digressions of complete irrelevance, he yet possesses a genius for sustained narrative. In spite of ;his high moral principles he does not believe that public morality' must always be in accord with private morality, and he suggests at moments that duplicity, if successful, as in the case of Sertorius or Eumenes, is by no means wholly despicable. The slight depression that might be engendered by his didacticism is relieved for us by his lapses into gullibility apd even super- stition. When Crassus junior stumbled on leaving the Temple of Venus, Plutarch regarded it as imprudent, even as impious, to disregard so significant a portent. In two separate passages he narrates how the mob in the forum or agora shouted so loudly that ravens dropped dead from the sky; he does not deny that, in certain circumstances, statues may burst into perspiration; he admits that on one occasion the forearm of a centurion began to exude, much to the consternation of his comrades, attar of roses; and he excuses himself for such credulity 'with the charming phrase " experiences differing front those of sensation arise in the imaginative part of the soul."
* * * * Warmly though I recommend Plutarch to the common reader, I should not prescribe him as a model for the intend- ing biographer. He is lifelike assuredly; he certainly manages with great skill to convey the contemporary environment; he is a master of vivid description. But I fear that, with all his merits, he wished to teach.
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