BOOKS OF THE DAY
Two Biographies : American
IT may be supposed that we read biographies for two reasons ; i
one reason s that we want to enjoy a good book, the other is that we want to "know about" somebody. If we accept this brutal division we can have two grounds of criticism. A good biography, we will say, is one which is not only pleasant to read for itself but which also illuminates its subject. The question now arises— the crucial question—can a biography be pleasant reading if it fails - to floodlight its victim ; or can it reveal the nature of the person it is about if it is not in itself a good book?
I belong, I must confess, to the school of critics which holds that a biography cannot achieve its purpose of telling you about some- body if it is not in itself a work of art with a life of its own ; because a biography is the communication of a personality to a public through another being. If this second personality, the author, is not creative, his portrait will he dead, not even a good photograph. Why Philip IV, say, and Madame Riviere are alive to us is because Velasquez and Ingres were great artists. Why Mark Antony, Cromwell and Madame de Charriere are alive for us now is because Plutarch and Carlyle and Geoffrey Scott were artists, not recording machines. They had vision and imagination ; they had likes and dislikes, and were not afraid of stating their point of view. One might say that they interpreted their characters as a Shakespearian actor interprets Hamlet or Juliet's Nurse. So one cannot but do battle with all one's might against the theory now gaining acceptance, and being worked on, that it is the duty of the biographer to abjure " cleverness " (think of a self-denying Boswell), to be as dull as he can lest he interpose himself between the reader and his subject and so on. Let us stoutly oppose the opinion that Lytton Strachey was a wicked man, and demand rather of our biographers that they first of all, as a primary condition of setting to work, determine to be writers, that is, to make their subjects live upon the page as a novelist does.
It is perhaps as a reaction against certain excesses of some of the imaginative writers that the new school of biographers are determined to contribute only a minimum of their own. To this school Mr. Steven- son belongs. He provides us, as far as one can judge, with all the facts (they cannot immediately be checked, for no refer- ences are given, no authorities referred to, no letters dated even when quoted from); they are rolled out in due succession, with no change of emphasis or tempo, so that no one fact seems more important or significant than another. It is clear that Mr. Stevenson is painstaking: he is, as far as one can judge, determined to be fair : he tries to get everything in: but in the result there is no perspective, no shape ; no drama of a life has been enacted. The other persons in the story emerge as pale ghosts, and we never seem to hear their voices : there is a certain clash of bodies, so to speak—Dickens, we can see, bumps up against Thackeray—but no battle of spirits. Anyone ignorant of Thackeray will certainly get most of the " facts " from this book ; but he will not get to " know " Thackeray, nor get the feel of his life, nor the sensation of the society around him.
Most people know something of Thackeray, but few, probably, have run across "jovial, brutal, vulgar, graphic" Ned Ward. Some of us have read the highly entertaining London Spy, reprinted not so long ago, a book filled with Elizabethan vigour rather than with Augustan decorum ; a few may have enjoyed the Hudibrastics of The Secret History of the Calves Head Club, and many will know his name from The Dunciad : but that is all. So Professor Troyer's task was different from Mr. Stevenson's : at all costs he had to make live, not only the figure, but Queen Anne's (Nub Street. He has done both. We get a sense of who and what Ned Ward was. The book, moreover, is a scholarly production, with notes and references and an admirable bibliography of Ward's works. It is not, however, for its scholarship that the book will commend itself to the general reader ; it is because it is well written and alive, so that the figure issues naturally from its background. This last is, surely, most important in a biography, and here again Mr. Stevenson gives us less help than he might. For instance, the fact that Thackeray stopped Ruskin's Unto This Last essays in Cornhill is simply left as a fact, whereas it is significant of an important part of the ethos Thackeray was trying to fight. We do, indeed, get a certain amount of comment on how the Victorian attitude to sex annoyed and distorted Thackeray but Mr. Stevenson does not allow us to
see the significance of all ;his. The utmost that he does is to suggest a discreet Freudianism.
But what really militates most against such books as Mr. Steven- son's is that the joy of writing, the love of words, the inter- weaving of the rhythm of paragraphs, the glory of little vignettes of minor characters, the fun or tension of the dramatic scene, are rigorously excluded. Mr. Troyer, on the other hand, obviously enjoyed the writing of his book. From the run of his paragraphs you can tell that there is consecutive creative thought going on. It is significant that Mr. Stevenson never discusses Thackeray's writing, while Mr. Troyer discusses not only what-Ned Ward did generally, but also his prose and his verse. Mr. Troyer's book belongs to the same category as Professor Sherburn's famous Early Career of Alexander Pope ; it may not be so good, but it is comparable with it. Perhaps it is easier to write of people separated from us by a greater span of time than are the Victorians, who still press upon us a little too closely for us to see them clearly. But it is not that alone. It is that the successful biographer allows himself to enter imaginatively into his material and enables the reader to share his own imaginative apprehension of his subject and the surroundings. The biographer has got to be "there," as the novelist is "there," with his characters. In reading Mr. Troyer's book, where, I may say to prevent misunderstanding, there is no "fine writing," no gratuitous empurpling of dull patches, we do imaginatively appre- hend something of the vivacious contemporary and rival of Defoe— without, it is to be added, becoming bogged in politics. The whole book spins along briskly, and, after reading it, we feel we have met
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