The Process of Solving the Problem

Benjamin was a Jew. He was born a British subject. He made a brilliant reputation at the Louisiana Bar and was offered a seat in the United States Supreme Court. He became United States senator. When his state seceded, he went with it, and filled three cabinet positions under the Confederacy. He fell with the immense collapse of that dream fabric. Then, at the age of fifty-four, he set himself to build up a new fortune and a new glory, and he died one of the most successful and respected barristers in London.[90]

But with fear thrown off, with enthusiastic desire really to understand sympathetically, we find no lack of interest. To any one the terrible storm in the harbor of Apia, when ships were wrecked like straws and lives were spilled out by scores, would offer material because of the horror of the events. But only with imaginative sympathy could we write an expository biography of a humble "Jackie" on a United States boat in the harbor. With such sympathy, as we read that after the gruelling agony of long fruitless fighting against the storm the sailors of the United States SteamshipTrenton, which was pounding its wooden hull to splinters on the reef, climbed into the rigging and cheered while the more lucky British boatCalliopesteamed past on her way to safety in the open sea, we are thrilled with the factthat of those gallant seamen every one is worthy of record. Some quiet lad from perhaps a white farmhouse tucked into a little valley, who was honestly doing his duty and hoping for the glory of the time when he should be a petty officer, now while the teeth of death are already bared gloriously lifts up his young voice in gallant recognition of his more successful fellows of theCalliope! And yet the official record of the event would imply no possibility of finding romance in this humble individual life.

The "meanest flower that blows" moved the poet's heart; we need not be poets, but only sympathetic human beings, with the great gift of comradeship, to be moved by even the lowliest man or woman. And the objection that rises unbidden and declares us unfit to write expository biography because we have not ourselves known great men is false. Quite truly Carlyle demolishes such objection: "What make ye of Parson White of Selborne? He had not only no great men to look on, but not even men; merely sparrows and cockchafers; yet has he left us aBiographyof these; which, under its titleNatural History of Selborne, still remains valuable to us; which has copied a little sentence or twofaithfullyfrom the Inspired Volume of Nature, and is itself not without inspiration. Go ye and do likewise." Certainly if you face the setting forth of the life of some large figure of the past you have a fascinating pageant to unriddle, to centralize. And just as surely if you turn to the familiar figures of your home town, of your family history, and really lay your spirit alongside, you will find deep significance for yourself and for your reader. For every human being has its Waterloo. Sometimes we play Wellington, sometimes Bonaparte, but whether winning or losing we all tread the same way, and the fight is as significant to each as ever the victory or defeat of Waterloo was to Wellington or Napoleon.

With this great requisite of imaginative sympathy that sees value in all human beings, then, we set out on our chief task, to find the life-problem of our particular hero. This necessitates definition and analysis. Somehow we must find the sphere in which our hero moved, the group to which he belonged, and must then discover the qualities that he showed in the group which made him a real individual. Such definition and analysis will appear when we examine the character of the hero and the events in his life.

In placing the subject of biography in a group we must take care to unify the character and at the same time to escape making him merely typical. A biography is a portrait, and if it omits the peculiar lineaments that distinguish the hero from all others, if it overlooks the little details of personality, it is valueless, and certainly uninteresting. The names of characters in old dramas, such asJustice Clement,Justice Shallow,Fastidious Brisk,Sir Politick Would-be, and of some of Scott's characters such asPoundtext,Rev. Gabriel Kettledrummle,Mr. Holdenough, indicate the central point of view of the characters but do not individualize them. Before we are really interested in these people we must see the personal traits that give charm. The unifying and centralizing of the character will be accomplished through discovering the fundamental nature. When Cavour wrote, "I am a son of Liberty, and it is to her that I owe all that I am," he classified himself at once through revealing the inner heart of his being. Mr. George Whibley gives both outward action and inward attitude when he writes, "George Buchanan was the type and exemplar of the wandering Scot." So a writer in the New YorkNation[91]classifies William James by findingthe controlling motives of his life. "He was a force of expansion, not a force of concentration. He 'opens doors and windows,' shakes out a mind that has long lain in the creases of prejudice. He is the most vital and gifted exemplar of intellectual sympathy." Again, Mr. Bradford, in characterizing General Sherman, writes, "Sherman is like one of our clear blue January days, with a fresh north wind. It stimulates you. It inspires you. But crisp, vivid, intoxicating as it is, it seems to me that too prolonged enjoyment of such weather would dry my soul till the vague fragrance of immortality was all gone out of it." And when some one asked Goldsmith, referring to Boswell, "Who is this Scotch cur at Johnson's heels?" Goldsmith replied, "He is not a cur, he is only a bur. Tom Davies flung him at Johnson in sport, and he has the faculty of sticking." Each of these characterizations classifies the subject; no one of them makes him a distinct personality, for thousands have been wandering Scots, forces of expansion, burs. The typifying is of great value in establishing the central point of view of the subject, but it cannot be left to stand alone in a real portrait.

It is necessary that we define our hero by determining the class to which he belongs, but such definition brings a great danger, the danger of making a warped interpretation. At once we must take care, when we discover the type of a man, not to overwork the type qualities, not to make everything conform to this inner core, whether the detail properly fits or not. For example, once we have called a man aliberalwe shall need to guard against denying the conservative acts which are in themselves contradictory of the general nature though in the large they fuse with it. Such a tag is likely, if not guarded against, to make the writer the victim of a kind of color-blindness in character, so that he can see only the crimson ofliberal, the lavender ofconservative. In a sentence like the following there lurks the possibility of overworking a point of view, of riding rough-shod over detailsthat do not immediately swing into line. Speaking of General Hooker, "General Walker observes shrewdly, 'He was handsome and picturesque in the extreme, but with a fatally weak chin' ... Bear it in mind in our further study." Spontaneity of reaction to the hero is in possible danger of extinction when the biographer has solidly set down the class name. The same danger is at hand when we find and state the controlling motive of the hero's life, as when we say that he was primarily ambitious, or exhibited above everything else courage. We need be careful lest trivial matters be made to appear ambitious, thrillingly courageous, and lest we deny what seems contradictory. In the following characterization of the historian Green by his friend the Rev. Mr. Haweis we find no such cramping effect, but a welling forth of creative impression that makes Green live before our eyes.

That slight nervous figure, below the medium height; that tall forehead, with the head prematurely bald; the quick but small eyes, rather close together; the thin mouth, with lips seldom at rest, but often closed tightly as though the teeth were clenched with an odd kind of latent energy beneath them; the slight, almost feminine hands; the little stoop; the quick alert step; the flashing exuberance of spirits; the sunny smile; the torrent of quick invective, scorn, or badinage, exchanged in a moment for a burst of sympathy or a delightful and prolonged flow of narrative—all this comes back to me vividly! And what narrative, what anecdote, what glancing wit! What a talker! A man who shrank from society, and yet was so fitted to adorn and instruct every company he approached, from a parochial assembly to a statesman's reception! But how enchanting were my walks with him in the Victoria Park, that one outlet of Stepney and Bethnal Green! I never in my life so lost count of time with any one before or since.... I have sometimes, after spending the evening with him at my lodgings, walked back to St. Philip's Parsonage, Stepney, towards midnight, talking; then he has walked back with me in the summer night, talking; and when the dawn broke it has foundus belated somewhere in the lonely Mile End Road, still unexhausted, and still talking.[92]

But when we have inveighed as much as we need against the dangers of classification, we must swing round to the first statement that for unifying the character and giving it fundamental significance such classification is of great importance.

Merely to find the type to which a character belongs is not sufficient; such a process leaves the character stamped, to be sure, but without interest. We care for living people not chiefly because of their type but because of their individuality, the little traits that set them apart from their fellows. The next step, therefore, is to discover and reveal the individuality. The type to which a character belongs is shown by the large sweep of his whole life; his individuality is revealed often most clearly in the slight incidents by the way. For this reason the personal anecdote assumes importance as adding both interest and completeness that consists in filling in the broad expanses of the portrait with the lines of individual expression. This does not mean that all anecdotes are of value for expository biography; only those which are truly in the stream of personality, which help to establish either the type or the individual. The whimsical nature of the little incident which Mr. George Whibley[93]relates of the "scoundrel" Tom Austin is of value not because it makes a picturesque note at a hanging, but because it really helps to establish the full picture of the man: "When Tom Austin was being haltered for hanging, the Chaplain asked him had he anything to say. 'Only, there's a woman yonder with some curds and whey, and I wish I could have a pennyworth of them before I am hanged, because I don't know when I shall see any again.'" It is easily said that Lincoln was a great democratic soul and a great humorist. These are twouseful tags. But when we know that to the Englishman who remarked, "In England, you know, no gentleman blacks his own shoes," he replied, "Whose does he black, then?" we feel the peculiar tang of the Lincoln personality along with the type qualities of democrat and humorist. After we have classified Washington as an austere, cold, unemotional being, we find both corrective for a too narrow classification, and insight into the peculiar qualities of the man when we read how he swore "like an angel from Heaven" on the famous occasion of the encounter with Lee. For the anecdote is, we see, really in the main flow of Washington's nature. General Wolfe is tagged as a romantic young warrior but takes on both interest and personality when we read of his repeating Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" as his men silently rowed him to the battle on the Heights of Abraham. The personality of Madame de Staël's father is largely illuminated when we learn that though the little daughter sat primly at table as long as her mother remained in the room, as soon as she retired, with a cry of delight the child flung her napkin at her father's head. Anecdote is highly useful so long as we remember that it is not for adornment but for revelation, not primarily for interest—though that is an important function—but rather for proving in dramatic particular the quality which we claim for our hero. Properly chosen anecdotes should be the high lights in the proof of qualities which the writer's exposition establishes in more sober manner. And of course they also serve to show the differentia which make the character an individual, and thus help to complete the definition.

When once we have defined the character, have found its class and to some extent its differentia, we can by analysisadd to our comprehension of it and to the distinguishing personal traits. We must break up the character and see its manifestations and the results of the influences that molded it. Heredity at once demands recognition. It is not insignificant that Emerson was the descendant of a long line of New England clergymen. The bravery of Stevenson is accounted for partly by the doughty old builder of lighthouses, his grandfather Robert Stevenson. Descent holds often, apparently, a guiding rein in directing a character into its life-problem. Emerson's problem was comparatively simplified, so far as personal integrity concerned him, for he was by nature good. Lowell testified that it was perfectly natural for himself to turn to literature, since in his childhood he had become so accustomed to the smell of Russia leather in the bindings of his father's books. The following sentence[94]shows the grip of descent through the centuries which is not disguised by the man's name: "The Mr. Balfour of those days has been altogether outgrown by the Admiralty First Lord of the existing coalition, a Balfour in name only, in breadth of shoulders, thickness of frame, heaviness of jaw, and proportions of forehead a Cecil marvelously recalling, not only his illustrious uncle, but that relative's Elizabethan ancestors." "Men are what their mothers made them," says Emerson. "You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere, as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical discovery from that jobber." Partly, at least, the life-problem is determined by the heredity; to each there is but one future, "and that is already determined in his lobes and described in that little fatty face, pig-eye, and squat form," to quote Emerson again even though he lays undue stress, perhaps, upon the power of descent. In the paragraph which follows you will find an interesting account of the ancestry of O. W. Holmes, with a statement also of the essential quiet of his life, whichis nevertheless so often thought of as worthy of biographical treatment.

Dr. Holmes came of this good, old, unmixed New England stock that ran back to Hell on the one side in the severest orthodoxy and up to Heaven on the other in large liberality. He discovered that the title deeds were all in Heaven—while all other claims were by squatters' rights outside the Garden of Eden. So Dr. Holmes grew into a Unitarian and proceeded to cultivate the descent which lies outside Paradise. His father was a minister, so beautiful in countenance, Holmes tells us, that he could never have believed an unkind thing, and his mother of different line was a Liberal by descent. Holmes was born, too, to the conflicting traditions of Yale and Harvard; but beyond being born, practically nothing ever happened to him afterwards. He had a little group of friends who were actually companions. During his whole life, except the two years of medical study in Europe in the beginning of his career, and the "hundred days in Europe" celebrated in one of his later books, he was never further away from Boston, for the most part, than Salem or Beverly, that Beverly, to which he referred in replying to a friend who had addressed a letter to him from "Manchester-by-the-Sea," as "Beverly-by-the-Depot." He went some summers to Pittsfield where he had a summer house, and where the sparkling Berkshire air seemed to suit his effervescent mind. But he was never "quite at home beyond the smell of the Charles River."[95]

Then when your hero grows up, what are his interests? To what profession or kind of work does he turn? Where does he find the satisfaction for his energy that searches an outlet? Does he, like Thomas Carlyle, try one and another profession only to fail and be driven, finally, into the one work in which he could find the answer to the life-problem that his personality presents? When his profession is chosen, what are his interests? Does he work out his problem in anarrowly restricted field, or does he call in the powers of a wide range of significant pursuits? No expository biography of Leonardo da Vinci can overlook the astounding breadth of the man's activity, especially as shown in the remarkable document which he presented to Ludovico Sforza arranging his attainments under nine different headings in military engineering and adding a tenth for civil engineering and architecture,—and finally throwing in, as a suggestion, his worth as painter and sculptor! There were the compounds of a life-problem sufficiently complex to satisfy the most captious. Or if the hero never moves from a tiny hamlet, treads only one path—as Pericles is said to have done between house and office during the great days of his power—the fact is significant. The grasp of ideas within whatever field the hero may choose is also important. The distinction between the personality that is merely efficient in handling facts, and the personality that dominates the facts and drives them at his bidding, that shows real power, has direct bearing on the nature and the solution of the life-problem.

Nor can you overlook the hero's beliefs, whether in ethics or religion, in politics, in the laws of society. In the analysis of Mr. Balfour, on page148, at once is apparent the large influence on his answer that is caused by his sophistication. The bravery of the Stoic, the voluptuous sentimentality of many religious people of modern times, vitally affect the nature of the character which possesses them. If your hero is by nature an aristocrat, if his sympathies are limited to the few choice people of the world, his life-problem is radically different from that of the natural democrat like Abraham Lincoln. Finally, whatever ideas he may hold about the relation in society of man to man, of man to woman, will inevitably influence his solution of his particular question,just as his beliefs are themselves partly determined by his physical being.

Closely allied with his beliefs will be his choice of friends. Has he the gift of familiarity, or does he struggle in vain to break through the bars of personality, or is he terrified at the gulf between himself and another? Does he regard friends as useful instruments, as pleasant companions, or as objects of devoted affection? And how do his friends react to him? It is worth remembering that the boy Tennyson wrote, in grief, "Byron is dead!"—not only the boy but the older poet is illuminated by the words. Stephen A. Douglas holding Lincoln's hat beside the platform while the Gettysburg Address was being delivered showed not only the mellowness of his own nature but the commanding power of friendship that Lincoln possessed. The number of friends and the range of their activity—whether selected from all sections of human activity or from the hero's own more limited field—are important.

Finally, the deeds of the hero are of the greatest significance in indicating how he met his life-problem. Did he "greet the unknown with a cheer" or did he like a doubtful bather shrink back from plunging into the stream of activity? Were his deeds actuated by generous motives, or by petty? "If," says Stevenson, "it is for fame that men do brave actions, they are only silly fellows after all." Macbeth strode through large events, as did Robert E. Lee, yet the dominating motives were quite different, and these motives throw the utmost light on the fundamentals of character.

Before you write, then, first define your hero, find his type and his individuality, and then analyze his character to determinehis descent, his intellectual interests, his beliefs, his friends, and his deeds. And remember that these are not in water-tight compartments, separated from each other, but that they fuse together to make the personality, to create the life-problem, and to answer it.

Dramatic biography is almost wholly the moving events of life. The evil of cheap fiction is partly that it will be nothing but events, that only dust will be raised, no meaning found. Expository biography may err in the opposite direction and exclude the "moving show," become only abstract analysis and definition. You must guard against this, because absence of events both complicates the writer's task and makes his success with the reader more problematic. Moreover, since so largely the positive personality of the hero will express itself in action, since largely through events we shall discover what the life-problem is and especially how it is met, to omit the flow of events is to lame the interpretation. All readers, it is well to remember, have the child's desire for more than mere information about the machine; they wish to "see it go." The vitality of fiction is always increased by dramatic presentation. Since you have a real character to make vital, bring to your writing the devices that make characters real. Carlyle[96]well characterizes the denatured style of treating living beings:

Those modern Narrations, of the Philosophic kind, where "Philosophy, teaching by Experience," has to sit like owl on housetop,seeingnothing,understandingnothing, uttering only, with solemnity enough, her perpetual and most wearisome hoo-hoo:—what hope have we, except the for the most part fallacious one of gaining some acquaintance with our fellow-creatures, though dead andvanished, yet dear to us; how they got along in those old days, suffering and doing; to what extent, and under what circumstances, they resisted the Devil and triumphed over him, or struck their colors to him, and were trodden under foot by him; how, in short, the perennial Battle went, which men name Life, which we also in these new days, with indifferent fortune have to fight, and must bequeath to our sons and grandsons to go on fighting....

The question at once arises, what events shall the writer select? The total course is mapped for you: there is the pedigree, there the birth, and finally there the funeral. These are inescapable. Just so, for most heroes, marriage. But to choose only those facts that are common to all, to make your hero do only the conventionally unavoidable things, will leave him without personality. The question is, what did he do that was peculiar to himself, what reaction to life did he alone, of all the myriads, make? It is true that most men and women spend their time at their profession or appointed task, whatever it may be, but what the reader cries for ishowdid they spend their time and energy? It is not sufficient that you tell your reader that Robert Franz labored at his profession of music. What you must do is to show how, in poverty, which, but for the inexhaustible kindness of Liszt, would have been unrelieved, with total deafness upon him, with his musician's-fingers twisted and useless with paralysis, and with only slight recognition from the world for his efforts, he quite beautifully subordinated his own personality for the sake of his art and for years labored in unremunerative love at the unwritten harmonies of Bach and Handel that the public might have complete realization of the otherwise crippled productions. When you tell that, your reader will understandRobert Franz, not merely a somebody. Choose, then, the events that all share in common if they are of value in giving a framework for your narrativepresentation, but especially choose those events that in their nature illuminate the personality and complement your analysis.

We think of events as being public. There is also the hero's private life. Often, especially with the more humble heroes, the home life is more important than the public deeds, brings out more clearly the real man than any amount of marching in the market place or discussing in the public square. The incident related of Robert E. Lee when he was President of Washington College is more revealing, almost, of his greatness of heart than a far more important deed of the great General. When a sophomore to whom Lee had recommended more intense application to work, with the warning of possible failure, remarked, "But, General, you failed," Lee quietly replied, "I hope that you may be more fortunate than I." To neglect either public or private life makes the biography less valuable; light upon the personality from whatever honest source is to be eagerly sought.

With your choice made, you yet face the difficulty of uniting events and personality. It is not that you have parallel lines, one of action and one of character; the two lines join and become one. You have the choice of observing the personality through the medium of events, or events through the medium of personality. Of the two, the latter is to be preferred. To understand the personality we heed to know whether it controls and directs events, or merely receives them. Into every life a large measure of chance enters. Does the personality merely receive the events, or does it master chance? Suppose that the following analysis[97]of two widely different characters is correct, just:

Mozart—grace, liberty, certainty, freedom, and precision of style, and exquisite and aristocratic beauty, serenity of soul, thehealth and talent of the master, both on a level with his genius; Beethoven—more pathetic, more passionate, more torn with feeling, more intricate, more profound, less perfect, more the slave of his genius, more carried away by his fancy or his passion, more moving, and more sublime than Mozart.... One is serene, the other serious.... The first is stronger than destiny, because he takes life less profoundly; the second is less strong, because he has dared to measure himself against deeper sorrows.... In Mozart the balance of the whole is perfect, and art triumphs; in Beethoven feeling governs everything and emotion troubles his art in proportion as it deepens it.

Now we know that Mozart's attitude toward patrons was sweetly deferential and graceful, whereas Beethoven rushed into the courtyard of his patron Prince Lobkowitz, shouting, "Lobkowitz donkey! Lobkowitz donkey!!" and when, in the company of Goethe, he once met an archduke, though Goethe made a profound bow with bared head, Beethoven reached up, jammed his hat down tighter upon his head, and, rigidly erect, stalked by without recognition of rank. These actions of Beethoven are emotionally tempestuous. We have our choice of interpreting them as resulting from his personality or of determining his personality as revealed by the deeds. In general it is better to view deeds and events in the light of personality.

Events happen to more than the hero alone; he is a member of society. It is necessary, therefore, to link the events of his life to the current of his times, to fit him into the background against which his life was played. How was he affected, what influence did he exert, what offices or positions of trust did he hold? Often, of course, estimate of the personality will be considerably determined by his relations with his contemporaries. You need to bear two cautions in mind: first, not to misjudge a man because moral or socialstandards have shifted since his times; and second, not to introduce so much matter about his relationships as to obscure the outlines of his personality or as to relegate him to less than the chief position. Imaginative sympathy will be sufficient to prevent the first. If you really look through your hero's eyes at the life that he saw, with his standards in mind, though you may have to condemn his attitude from a more modern point of view, you will be able to see that his deeds are quite comprehensible, that perhaps, had you been in his place, you would have acted likewise. We no longer decorate important bridges with the heads of criminals set on pikes, as our ancestors did, nor do we burn supposed witches. But though we condemn Edward the First of England for the one and the Salem Puritans for the other, we can still love both Edward and the Puritans—if we have imaginative sympathy. The second caution requires simply that you make your hero dominate the scene. Now this is not an easy task when you are reviewing, in many pages, the gorgeous pageant of an age. We can easily imagine that if Parr had written the Life of Johnson which he said would have been so much superior to that by Boswell, and had included the threatened "view of the literature of Europe," the poor old hero would have been roughly jostled away behind the furniture. Mr. Barrett Wendell paid Carlyle a tribute of the highest kind in writing of hisFrederick the Great:

Such a mass of living facts—for somehow Carlyle never lets a fact lack life—I had never seen flung together before; and yet the one chief impression I brought away from the book was that to a degree rare in even small ones it possessed as a whole the great trait of unity. In one's memory, each fact by and by fell into its own place; the chief ones stood out; the lesser sank back into a confused but not inextricable mass of throbbing vitality. And from it all emerged more and more clearly the one central figure who gave his name to the whole—Frederick of Prussia. It was as they boreon him from all quarters of time and space, and as he reacted on them far and wide, that all these events and all these people were brought back out of their dusty graves to live again.[98]

Make your hero stand near the footlights, then, and take care that he be not in the shadows of the wings.

From a purely rhetorical point of view the inclusion of the events in the hero's life is important because it offers a useful structural scheme for the writing, the chronological order. The exact succession of events need not be followed, surely; sometimes the intended effect will demand a reversal of actual order, but the relation in time will be found valuable for showing the growth of personality, of intellectual grasp, of influence upon the world. Do not, then, neglect the active life of your hero. By presenting it you will find the task of composition lightened, you will help to establish the personality, and you will give to the writing the dramatic vitality that is so much desired by the reader.

However imaginatively sympathetic you may be in interpreting your hero, however carefully you may try to find his life-problem, and however well you may attempt to define and analyze his personality, you will be confronted with one almost insuperable problem—how to tell the truth. In no form of exposition is this problem more difficult. For we are more moved by human personality than by anything else, more "drawn to" a person than to a machine, more affected by the comparatively parallel problem of another human being than by the inanimate existence of wood and steel. Long observation and study of our heroes seems often to make us even less fitted to estimate their worth, for we reachthe state of companionship with them where we resent any fact that does not tally with our formed judgment, and are tempted to exclude it. Mr. Gamaliel Bradford divides biographers into "those who think they are impartial and those who know they are not." Partiality operates, of course, both for and against personalities. To quote Mr. Bradford again, "Gardiner, for all his fairness, obviously praises the Puritans because they were Puritans, the Cavaliers although they were Cavaliers." Adulation and damnation are the logical extremes which result from a too operative blind spot on the retina of judgment. You must remember and cling to the fact that no man is perfect and no man wholly bad. Much as Boswell loved Johnson he had the good sense to write, of his biography, "And he will be seen as he really was, for I profess to write, not his panegyric, which must be all praise, but his Life; which, great and good as he was, must not be supposed to be entirely perfect." George Washington has terribly suffered in the estimates of later times because of the desire to make him perfect. The true expository biographer will conceal nothing that is significant, whether he wishes, in spite of himself, perhaps, that it did not exist.

The best cure for the errors of falsity from over-love or over-condemnation is still sane imaginative sympathy. Stevenson made perhaps the greatest personal triumph in his portraiture when he drew Weir of Hermiston, the dour old "hanging judge" who so outraged by his life all the author's feelings and is yet so presented that the reader loves him despite his inhumanity, really perceives that an honest, even if tough, heart beat in his breast. Another safeguard is absence of desire to make rhetorical effect. An aureole is picturesque, horns and hoofs add piquancy; the hand itches to deck the hero as saint or to fit him out as devil. But you must subordinate any such cheap desire, must write with the restraint that comes from seeing your hero steadyand seeing him whole. Balance is the golden word. "This thing is true," wrote Emerson, "but that is also true." The vulgarity of the superlatives of political campaigns has no place in your pages.

This imaginatively sympathetic attitude must not rely on itself alone, but must employ the other safeguard against untruth, must passionately pursue facts, and facts, and still facts to make the conception of the hero complete and to give the writing that so much desired quality of fullness. The very greatest care is necessary to determine what facts are true and what are fallacious. You are largely at the mercy of your second or third or tenth-hand sources when you write of historical characters. When your hero is a living person you must challenge the report of your own senses and general experience lest you admit what is false or omit what is significant.

And when you have assembled all your facts, and have determined upon your interpretation of the hero, take the greatest caution that you do not try to make the life a "lesson." Presumably a child never more earnestly desires to commit murder than when some little Willie or Susie has been held up as a model. If Willie and Susie escape with only kicked shins, they may count luck benevolent. Your duty is to understand and love, not to preach about the character. You are to give us an estimate of the great adventure of this person through life, and leave to us to make the moral, if any is to be made. If the life has a message, the reader will catch it; if it has not, silence is virtuous.

Finally, the rhetorical problem of forming your material presents itself. First of all do not forget that all the charmsof style of which you are capable should be summoned to your aid. Since you deal with the fascinating subject of human personality your writing should not be dull. All too many biographical essays begin stupidly. When a first sentence reads, "Augustine was born at Tagaste, near Carthage (about forty miles south of it), North Africa, November 13,A.D.354, seven years after the birth of Chrysostom," a reader hardly finds a warmly inviting gleam in the writer's eye; he continues to read only if he brought determination with him. But when Mr. Charles Whibley begins, of Captain Hind, "James Hind, the Master Thief of England, the fearless Captain of the Highway, was born at Chipping Norton in 1618"; or of Haggart, "David Haggart was born at Canonmills, with no richer birthright than thievish fingers and a left hand of surpassing activity"; or of Sir Thomas Overbury, "Thomas Overbury, whose haggard ghost still walks in the secret places of the Tower, was born a squire's son, in 1581,"—when he uses such sentences to introduce the hero to the reader, the ejaculatory "Eh?" takes voice and the reader canters down the new delightful lane where a finger beckons. Whether you use anecdote, or quotation, or important fact, or statement of birth, or description, let your beginning invite and not dismay.

The chief structural problem is, without doubt, to fuse the analyzed elements of deeds and friends and interests and others into one organic whole. If you use the chronological sequence of events, which has already been discussed, showing how each event or group of events indicates the character, you will have an easily followed plan. Such a plan, or that of treating the whole life from the point of view of the central, controlling motive, is the ideal method. If you choose to unify the whole by showing how events, friends, interests of various kinds, and the other manifestations of the hero's life all establish the central motive, you will have a more difficult, though more elastic form. With this planyou can distribute the details in the points where they will be of most value, can, for example, indicate a change in the hero's nature by approaching through an event, a friendship, a turning of tastes in reading or in general interests. The difficulty here lies in the tendency toward such dispersion of details as to destroy unity even though to gain this is the chief intention. In the face of this difficulty you may use a third method, which is likely to be less pleasing, less artistic, but more easily applied. You can divide your material under the headings "events," "friends," "heredity," "interests," and then can treat each group, by itself, from the central point of view. This is a useful method, and in complicated lives it is sometimes the only method that is reasonably easy to handle. Closely similar to this method is that of dividing your material under the headings of the ways in which your hero affected his times, the ways in which he was known. Thus you might treat of the reputation as converser, as organizer, as literary man, as public servant, as friend of the poor, or whatever heading your hero's life affords.

Whatever method you may employ, you should remember that a human life does not appear in separate, distinct phases, that a man does not seem to be now this, now that, but rather all details, of whatever nature, mingle and fuse into a unit, however complicated it may be. You should attempt, then, to make one main thread, of however many colors it may be woven, rather than a series of parallel threads. Note how Thackeray neatly unites various phases and forms of interest in Goldsmith's life,[99]so neatly that as you casually read you are not aware of the diversity of material—though it is there—but think rather of the total effect.

If, then, you assume the attitude of imaginative sympathy, and study your hero until you know what his particular life-problem was, what his type and what his individuality, andwith love and yet restraint make your estimate, aiming at truth to character and to facts of his life, you will produce writing that will be more than a mere scholar's document, writing that will warm the heart of your reader to a new personality and will be a friend of a winter evening fireside.

"Jeté sur cette boule,Laid, chétif et souffrant;Étouffé, dans la foule,Faute d'être assez grand;"Une plainte touchanteDe ma bouche sortit.Le bon Dieu me dit: Chante,Chante, pauvre petit."Chanter, ou je m'abuse,Est ma tâche ici-bas.Tous ceux qu'ainsi j'amuse,Ne m'aimeront-ils pas?"

"Jeté sur cette boule,Laid, chétif et souffrant;Étouffé, dans la foule,Faute d'être assez grand;

"Une plainte touchanteDe ma bouche sortit.Le bon Dieu me dit: Chante,Chante, pauvre petit.

"Chanter, ou je m'abuse,Est ma tâche ici-bas.Tous ceux qu'ainsi j'amuse,Ne m'aimeront-ils pas?"

In these charming lines of Béranger,[101]one may fancy described the career, the suffering, the genius, the gentle nature of Goldsmith, and the esteem in which we hold him. Who of the millions whom he has amused doesn't love him? To be the most beloved of English writers, what a title that is for a man! A wild youth, wayward, but full of tenderness and affection, quits the country village where his boyhood has been passed in happy musing, in idle shelter, in fond longing to see the great world out of doors, and achieve fame and fortune; and after years of dire struggle and neglect and poverty, his heart turning back as fondly to his native place as it had longed eagerly for change when sheltered there, he writes a book and a poem, full of the recollections and feelings of home; he paints the friends and scenes of his youth, and peoples Auburn and Wakefield with remembrances of Lissoy. Wander he must, but he carries away a home-relic with him, and dies with it on his breast. His nature is truant; in repose it longs for change,—as on thejourney it looks back for friends and quiet. He passes to-day in building an air-castle for to-morrow, or in writing yesterday's elegy; and he would fly away this hour, but that a cage and necessity keep him. What is the charm of his verse, of his style and humor?—his sweet regrets, his delicate compassion, his soft smile, his tremulous sympathy, the weakness which he owns? Your love for him is half pity. You come hot and tired from the day's battle, and this sweet minstrel sings to you. Who could harm the kind vagrant harper? Whom did he ever hurt? He carries no weapon save the harp on which he plays to you and with which he delights great and humble, young and old, the captains in the tents or the soldiers round the fire, or the women and children in the villages, at whose porches he stops and sings his simple songs of love and beauty. With that sweet story of "The Vicar of Wakefield" he has found entry into every castle and hamlet in Europe. Not one of us, however busy or hard, but once or twice in our lives has passed an evening with him, and undergone the charm of his delightful music.

Goldsmith's father was no doubt the good Doctor Primrose, whom we all of us know. Swift was yet alive, when the little Oliver was born at Pallas, or Pallasmore, in the county of Longford, in Ireland. In 1730, two years after the child's birth, Charles Goldsmith removed his family to Lissoy, in the county Westmeath, that sweet "Auburn" which every person who hears me has seen in fancy. Here the kind parson brought up his eight children; and loving all the world, as his son says, fancied all the world loved him. He had a crowd of poor dependants besides those hungry children. He kept an open table, round which sat flatterers and poor friends, who laughed at the honest rector's many jokes, and ate the produce of his seventy acres of farm. Those who have seen an Irish house in the present day can fancy that one at Lissoy. The old beggar still has his allotted corner by the kitchen turf; the maimed old soldier still gets his potatoes and buttermilk; the poor cottier still asks his honor's charity and prays God bless his reverence for the sixpence; the ragged pensioner still takes his place by right of sufferance. There's still a crowd in the kitchen, and a crowd round the parlor table; profusion, confusion, kindness, poverty. If an Irishman comes to London to make his fortune,he has a half-dozen of Irish dependants who take a percentage of his earnings. The good Charles Goldsmith left but little provision for his hungry race when death summoned him; and one of his daughters being engaged to a Squire of rather superior dignity, Charles Goldsmith impoverished the rest of his family to provide the girl with a dowry.

The small-pox, which scourged all Europe at that time, and ravaged the roses off the cheeks of half the world, fell foul of poor little Oliver's face when the child was eight years old, and left him scarred and disfigured for his life. An old woman in his father's village taught him his letters, and pronounced him a dunce. Paddy Byrne, the hedge-schoolmaster, then took him in hand; and from Paddy Byrne he was transmitted to a clergyman at Elphin. When a child was sent to school, in those days, the classic phrase was that he was placed under Mr. So-and-So'sferule. Poor little ancestors! it is hard to think how ruthlessly you were birched, and how much of needless whipping and tears our small forefathers had to undergo! A relative—kind Uncle Contarine—took the main charge of little Noll; who went through his school-days righteously doing as little work as he could, robbing orchards, playing at ball, and making his pocket-money fly about whenever fortune sent it to him. Everybody knows the story of that famous "Mistake of a Night," when the young schoolboy, provided with a guinea and a nag, rode up to the "best house" in Ardagh, called for the landlord's company over a bottle of wine at supper, and for a hot cake for breakfast in the morning,—and found, when he asked for the bill, that the best house was Squire Featherstone's, and not the inn for which he mistook it. Who does not know every story about Goldsmith? That is a delightful and fantastic picture of the child dancing and capering about in the kitchen at home, when the old fiddler gibed at him for his ugliness, and called him Æsop; and little Noll made his repartee of:—

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