MR. ASQUITH ON BIOGRAPHY.
WE are not sure that we altogether agree with Mr. Asquith upon the subject of autobiography. In the brilliant " lecture which" he -delivered on the 15th inst. at "the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, a lecture which is one of the finest evidences we know of the charm of discursiveness, and leaves an impression like that of reading "The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table," he seems to say that autobiography must always be defective in point of art because the artist must be by the very nature of his subject "an absorbed and concentrated egotist." Is that not like saying that no painter, however great, ever painted his own portrait well ? which we all know to be untrue. We see no reason why a man should be egotistic in describing his own deeds and thoughts on paper any more than in conversing about them, and we have all met men who can relate the circum- stances and motives of their own lives in a spirit of profound humility, or, still more frequently, of indifference, as if they were speaking of third persons. Marie Bashkirtseff was not egotist because she was writing her Life, but because she was egotist to the very centre of her being, egotist who could tell the Almighty while praying at least with hearty desire for a response, "And 0 God, it is I, I—Marie Ba.shkirtsefr Nor can we see any reason why a man or woman should write vcrie on such:a subject than on any other. He or she knows a-_ great .de-al about it, and why Should they set 'forth their lnowledge so as .to fail- in impact on their audience ? The most artistic books Dickens and Charlotte Bronte ever wrote are "David Copperfield " and " Villette," and both are admitted to be in essence autobiographies. In both the reader, if a critic, is conscious that the writer has a mastery of his or her method such as is unequalled in any other of their works, even if thofe works are better from some other cause. Introspection does not prohibit, or even interfere with, art, else were there no such thing as an eloquent preacher, for it is from his own mind that he must draw his sharpest warnings and his most encouraging accounts of the way to moral victory. The true reason why autobiographies are so unsatisfactory is, we conceive, a widely different one. An autobiography never can be, or seem to be, perfectly true. It cannot be true because no man com- pletely knows himself. He sometimes thinks he does ; but there are points in his nature which he has never per- ceived, faults to which he is wholly blind, merits which escape him as completely as the shape of his own back. It is not all egotism, though, of course, egotism has a most blinding effect, for men often attribute to themselves in all sin- cerity faults which they do not possess, and which those who know them better than they know themselves are aware from the whole record of their lives cannot exist. Many old officers will confirm us when we say that one of the most daring officers in the British Army, a man who did not know what fear was, and had something of General Picton's lust for danger, lived and died after a life of heroic deeds in the immovable conviction that he was a coward, and did his wonderful feats to hide his weakness from his comrades. He was tested once by an intimate and amazed friend "to cure his delusion," and in the extremest danger his pulse did not alter three beats. Scores of men who are really kindly to weak- ness believe themselves to be immovably hard, and a certain callousness of nature is often disguised from its possessor by his belief in his own aptitude for logic. One or two men have been supposed to have told the whole truth in their biographies because they were shameless about their sexual relations, but there were whole departments of their natures without which their lives could not have been lived that to themselves were imperceptible. Every man, says Oliver Wendell Holmes, is three men,—John as he is known to himself, John as he is known to his friends, and John as he is known to his Maker. If John could know himself as perfectly as he is known to his Creator, and could with exquisite art put himself on paper, his friends would say "That is fine art, but that is not John; how easily do men deceive themselves." We do not doubt that there were in Benven.uto Cellini—the worst, though not the meanest, man who ever painted himself—elements of character which, had he had the power either to see or paint them, would have profoundly modified that gruesome portrait. Haydon ? queries Mr. Asquith. But was even Haydon, who, we admit, seems to us to have approached nearer to true portraiture than any other autobiographer, besotted and bemused with vanity, as he appears in his memoirs to be ; or was he always arguing with himself that he was not the failure he dimly perceived himself to be, and making every event and most thoughts support that theory? There will never be a true autobiography which is also accepted as true; nor do we know that if there were, the spectacle of Marsyas five minutes after his flaying would add much to the wisdom, or even the know- ledge, of any but the most skilled anatomists. All the auto- biographies ever written have affected the world much less than Plutarch's Lives, many of the stories in which are only legendary.
We have much more sympathy with Mr. Asquith's ideas upon the subject of biography, and especially with his want of respect for letters as aids in judging of a man's character. They are often most amusing or interesting reading, but they not infrequently reveal very little. There is less spontaneity in the mass of letters than is usually suspected. Even if the writer is not trying to produce a special effect, as Horace Walpole, for instance, was, or Amiel, he either wishes to please Or displease his correspondent, and indites not so much what he really thinks as what he wishes his• correspondent to think he is thinking. This is true very often even of descrip- tiVe letters. Madame d'Arblay's memoirs were, we have no doubf, based on letters she wrote from the Court to friends at home, as well as on a diary, but it is very difficult to recon- struct Madame d'Arblay -from them, as difficult as to recon- struct Dickens from his grand letter, "David Copperfield." The letters addressed to the subject of biography tell us more, as Mr. Asquith says, but then it is more, as he also says, of the estimate formed of him by his friends or enemies than of his real character. It is this difficulty of trusting materials which makes personal knowfedge in the biographer so invaluable, though we should not agree if Mr. Asquith means to imply that the most enlightening knowledge is always that of a friend. Some friends, strong friends, are often invisible to each other, each projecting something of himself into the estimate he forms. The sagacious friend is, of course, invaluable as biographer if he can do the work well, but we are not certain that he always sees more than the sagacious enemy. We entirely agree, for instance, with Lord Rosebery, who wishes to add Purcell's Life of Cardinal Manning to the list of "great" biographies ; but the man who thinks that Mr. Purcell liked his subject, or was even able quite to endure him, cannot read in any true sense of reading. Nor are we quite sure that the best biographer is he who pours white light on his subject, and so complies with Mr. Asquith's condition that the biographer "should not be a judge." Our reason may seem a little hypercritical, but we suspect that many will endorse it. The white-light biographer is apt to put himself too much out of sympathy with his reader, who always either approves or disapproves, and finding that the biographer does neither, suspects Jaim of writing up to a preconceived intention. Mr. Asquith quotes Boswell as an illustration of his opinion; but surely Boswell at heart was full of passionate admiration for his hero, whom he had clearly the capacity to understand,—the real answer to Macaulay's estimate of Boswell. We take it something of liking or disliking is essential to the great biographer, and as the "candid friend" is usually a little malignant, we prefer the former. Mr. Asquith uttered some eloquent sentences about the strangeness of our ignorance about Shakespeare's personality ; but is it not the strangest fact about that personality that this man, who must for years have lived in a crowd, and who must have been one of the most sympathetic of mankind—or how could he have understood both Benedick and Hamlet P—never found a friend who recognised his genius sufficiently to wish to describe his life and him? We could find it in our heart, too, to fight Mr. Asquith heartily for his dictum, quoted from Voltaire, that "we owe consideration to the living, to the dead only truth." The man who draws Mr. Micawber from his own father has in him somewhere something that we cannot altogether pardon. Enough, however, of criticism. Let us finish by heartily acknowledging the charm of Mr. Asquith's thoughts when he is thinking aloud on a non-political subject, and by quoting his peroration, which, as given in the verbatim reports, seems to us not only a perfect bit of literature, but the best apology ever offered for those who persist in the difficult, and often thankless, task of writing biographies ;— " The abiding interest of biography for each of us depends, after all, upon our estimate of the worth and reality of human life. Byron in one of his earliest letters—I quote from the new edition by which Mr. Brother° has laid all lovers of literature under a heavy debt—Byron expresses in his characteristic way the cynical view when he says:—‘ When one subtracts from life infancy, which is vegetation, sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning—how much remains of downright existence ? The summer of the dormouse.' If so the less said about it, the sooner it is forgotten, the better. But, in truth, it is because we all feel that life is to us the most serious of realities that we crave to know more of the lives of others As it was said of old, 'He fashioneth their hearts alike.' And then the reading of biography becomes something more than a form of literary recreation. True, it furnishes the memory with a portrait gallery of interest- ing faces. True, it makes history and philosophy and poetry vivid with the personalities of the men to whom we owe great causes, great systems, great thoughts. But it does more than this. It brings comfort, it enlarges sympathy, it expels selfish- ness, it quickens aspiration. 'I console myself,' says Emerson in the poverty of my thoughts, in the paucity of great men, in the malignity and dulness of the nations, by falling back on these recollections, and seeing what the prolific soul could beget on actual nature. Then I dare; I also will essay to be.' And if at times we are tempted, as who is not ? to doubt the ulti- mate purpose and meaning of human existence when we think of the millions of lives which deserve no record—lives which came to nothing, lives full of,' deeds as well undone '—we must take refuge in the faith to which, in lines that ought not to die. Edward FitzGerald has given noble and moving expression t—
For like a child sent with a fluttering light To feel his way across a gusty night, Man walks the world. Again and yet again The lamp shall be by fits of passion slain. But shall not He who sent him from the door
Relight the lamp once mare, and yet once more ? '16
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