Biography

Biography (Greek, a description of life) is an account of the life and character of some actual person. The types of it are very various. A biography may be a mere chronicle of facts, like Marcellinus' Life of Thucydides, or Cornelius Nepos' lives (all but one of which, however, are abridgments); it may be written with a special purpose - thus, Xenophon's Memorabilia is written to defend Socrates' character, but not to describe his philosophical views; Sallust's Catiline is probably intended to whitewash Julius Cresar, and Plutarch's lives have a religious and moral as well as a purely biographical purpose. Or it may consist largely of carefully selected table talk, as does Boswell's Life of Johnson - in many ways the most vivid of English biographies. Or it may describe not only the person, but his contemporaries of all sorts - like Masson's Life of Milton. Again, many modern biographies pay much attention to the ancestry and education of their subject, the conditions which helped to form his character, etc. Those of Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, in whose family there was insanity, and whose character and education were both very anomalous, are conspicuous instances. Probably the so-called "scientific biography" of this type has a great future before it. But the artistic biography, when really well written, is often far more truthful and more permanently valuable than many far more laborious or detailed biographies, because the insight and sympathy of the author more than supply the place of much research. On the other hand there are many very valuable biographies in which the work of the biographer consists mainly of selection and arrangement; and the book is made up of letters, etc., connected by a thread of narrative.

Biographical dictionaries deserve a passing mention. The French Biographic Universelle of some 35 vols, was published in France between 1830 and 1835. A comprehensive dictionary of German biography is in progress, and so also is the English Dictionary of National Biography. Though primarily sources of information, these, especially the latter, possess some literary value. The same may be said of the biographies of men eminent in some special branch of art or science. Every great newspaper office contains many biographies of eminent living men, carefully written and frequently revised, ready for publication simultaneously with the announcement of their death. These, too, are often of some literary value. But a fashion has arisen of late years of publishing the lives of eminent men in their lifetime. Mr. Gladstone's character has been analysed in special works alike by friends and foes; the same is true of Prince Bismarck, Lord Beaconsfield, and others; and the ablest but most hostile account of Napoleon III. was published in his lifetime in Kinglake's War in the Crimea.

Much biographical matter is, of course, not biographical in form - e.g. contemporary memoirs or histories of court and political life; or such collections of letters as those of Cicero and Madame de Sevigne; while such character sketches as are found in Shakespeare's historical plays may often be more vivid and truthful than a formal Life. Much history, too, is inseparable from biography, though the student must not fall into the error of supposing, with the late Canon Kingsley, that "history is concerned with men and women, and with nothing else." The modern scientific schools of historians would say that the reverse was nearer the truth; that the conditions which make the personages, geographical, economic, political, racial, etc., are more important, in so far as they can be assigned, than the personages by themselves; and that economic history, constitutional law, and the social and intellectual life of the masses are of more substantial importance than the conspicuous personal traits and events which stand out from the history.

Religious biographies, especially in modern times, are of special importance, partly from their numbers, and partly because they are one of the most conspicuous forms of the psychological type of biography. Unfortunately many of them are very inferior in execution, taste, and literary ability, and many of the personages are utterly unimportant in history.

But the most valuable type as a study of character is probably the autobiography (Greek autos, self) for its self-revelations, conscious or unconscious, of the character of its author and subject. Such a work as Rousseau's Confessions is a realistic study of a morbid, weak, restless, yet versatile and powerful mind. The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff (q.v.) is a striking example of somewhat the same type. St. Augustine's Confessions and Cardinal Newman's Apologia are conspicuous instances of religious mind-history; Goethe's Aus meinem Leben is a sketch of the growth of the author's own culture and powers, of which, unfortunately, much is certainly fiction; while two of the best of recent autobiographies are that of Mark Pattison and that of John Stuart Mill - the latter mainly as a history of the growth of the religions and philosophical opinions of a man whose early training was both exceptionally severe and remarkably unsuitable.

The question as to the degree of reticence a biographer should observe as to his hero's faults has been sometimes discussed. Most biographers have glossed them over, on the principle that nothing but good should be spoken of the dead. This, however, is hardly fair to posterity. Yet to mention them may be to give them an unfair prominence above the mass of unimportant detail which makes up most of every man's life. Mr. Froude's Carlyle is a conspicuous instance of this latter extreme.