Andre Maurois

• Is. 6d.)

I WAS prepared to read M. Maurois's book with milchanhnosity, for I felt that his practice, so far as I knew it, would proceed

from a precept with which I could not accommodate myself. Having read the book, I feel like an Irishman who has been deprived of a fight because the passer-by will not tread on the tail of- his coat.

The disparity between theory and practice; especially when the theory is established with such sensitive consciousness as M. Maurois exhibits, is disconcerting. It makes us wonder

-Whitt safety there is in the world-; how far we are expressing what we think we are expressing, and even if our right hand kithivs what our right hand does. With all our will to justice 'and reverence, we say something which gives the impreSsion That we are patronizing, that we are Cynical or biassed.

Underlying M. Maurois's carefully articulated body of aesthetic doctrine is the insistence on " detichihent:" He claims that this is the golden ride of the modern intist.

• " We will not (he says) let the biographer heYe his judgments dictated to him by pre--conceived ideas ; we demand. that the observation of facts, and nothing else, shall lead to the expression of general ideas, and that these general ideas shall afterwards be verified by fresh and independent research, conducted with care and 'Without 'passion. We want all the documents* to be used if they throw light upon a new aspect of the subject ; neither fear, nor admiration, nor. hostility.must lead the. biographer to neglect or to pass-over a single one of them. in silence: .

; Against .this.. opinion we may balance that ,of another ETe.lichluan, Henri Massis, who suggests that the practice of

this rule may produce a feeble dilettante, . " qui no pout pas ou ne yeut pas choisir, soit qu'il desespOre de sortir de hii-refNme, de 'ass sensations, de ses impressions—et it devieht stars off seoptiqui, ; -Soh gull fess° de-ses idees de ion moi la realite dif monde, 'et un tel idealiste's'adore a regal de Dieu."

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Somewhere between these two views lies the truth. On the one hand is the cosmopolitan Sceptic with a sort of despairing

belief in the efficacy cif -psychology ; bri the Other hand* the thick.rooted Frenchman and Catholic. -Our English Mind can accept neither of them without reservations. We ask our- selves, in practical mood,towhat M. Maurois's detachment" has led hiin ; and the. answer is that he has reached up and patted the giants on their heads, told them that they are adorable fellows, that he understands them perfectly, and that they need not worry. NIA only has he abstained from preconeekred ideas ; he has also been afraid to approach his subjects with preconceived feelings, and we are forced to

wonder, therefore, why he was led to approach them at all.

Judging from his biographical essays, we found him to be so detached that he was like a little man on a mountain, glancing ender drooping eyelids, and pointing with dePressed finger at

the mighty city in the plain below. .

M. Maurois himself seems to have, qualms, for he says about his book on Shelley :

I don't hike the book any longer. In my eyes it is spoilt an ironic tone which came from the fact that the irony was aimed at myself by -myself. I wanted to kill the romantic in me ; and, in order to do it, I scoffed at it in Shelley," , .

. We • conclude, • therefore, that M. Maumis abstained from approaching his' subject with untrammelled feeling, because his emotions were all mortgaged in the heavy expenditure of self-distress. He was uprooted, agonized by his homeless- - ness ; and in this mood how could he feel definitely one way or another for the great men about whom he was writing ?

He used them merely as symbols for -his own restlessness ; • and the intellectual detachment which he so conscientiously cultivated was nullified by the emotional detachment resulting from his inhibitions. Where he knew not what he felt, where he had no inspired and intuitive partisanship, he must—by a sort of effort towards adjusting the balance--cultivate a mental clarity, he must stand back and observe with that fine French psychological niceness which makes his work so initially attractive. But we suspect him de s'egarer avec methode, as Michelet put it.

So much for results. But results do not always justify the means. Certainly the methods which M. Maurois lays down for the practice of the art of biography are much more con- vincing than their fruits. I believe that a biography can be too artfully, constructed.; that its economy, and its author's elimination and arrangement of material, may give a thin or partial portrait. Look, for instance, at the figure of Francis Bacon in Mr. Lytton Strachey's last book. The blood, the subtle genius, have been drawn away, and a thin- venom substituted. We must be careful how we play with facts, and it is always more sumptuous for the biographer to give his victim the benefit of the doubt, remembering that the

greatest and noblest events in a life are the events which never happen. If the writer pour out his material in an orderly profusion, as Boswell, Forster, and Lewes did, there is a probability of a four-square figure emerging, whom we can know and-live with and judge for ourselves.

M. Maurois claims that modern biography is a distinctly different art from that of former times. He says that it has three motives ; the first, a search for truth ; the second, an insistence on the complexity of personality ; the third, the presentment of a figure who can solace us in our age of doubts. Against this he suggests that the older biographers sought, first, to maintain a legend ; secondly, to insist on the homo- geneity of character of their heroes ; thirdly, to present a moral and ethical example. I think, however, that M. Maurois's ideal of the modern type, Mr. Strachey, does all the things which the older biographers are supposed to do, while Boswell is a perfect example of our author's idealof a modern biographer.

Our author says truly that a " great life well told always carries a suggestion of a philosophy of life, but it gains nothing by an expression of that philosophy." There is the possibility, however, that a writer can be more retiring and modest by expressing his views directly than by screening them so that they creep into every crevice and corner of his work, until it is soaked with the dye of his opinion, and the truth .of the picture is spoiled.

• On the whole it will be seen that we feel a certain unrest about M. Maurois's work, one which is not justified by appear- ances. This book, for instance, has everything to recommend it. It is clear, well-informed, witty, and conclusive. It disposes of the problems of biography as an art, as a science, and as a means of self-expression for the writer and the reader. It deals with autobiography, and with' the relation of the art of the biographer to those of the novelist and the historian. In all these divagations he is looking for a central motive, so that the method of this particular art can be stated in distinction. " The proper function of biography," he states, " is to deal with the individual and the instantaneous." That is the special task of the biographer, one which involves a reconciliation of " the rock of truth with the rainbow of personality." When we think of the magnitude of that task, a grimness overcomes us, just as it overcame Mr. Belloc when he made his malicious understatement, "Biography's about