THE PURPOSE OF BIOGRAPHY

I

WHAT is biography for? What useful purpose does it serve? Why should one write it? What is its actual importance in the field of literature? Above all, what is autobiography for, and what proper motive might one have for writing it?’

I put these questions to one of my literary acquaintances the other day, in the hope of clearing my own mind. It has once or twice been suggested to me (as I suppose it has been suggested to everybody who has ever published anything) that I should write the biography of this-or-that eminent person. My instinct promptly jibbed at the suggestion; and in each case, after dallying with the idea awhile, I threw it over. Then latterly, while looking into one or two current biographies, I was moved to wonder what prompted my instinct. Was it the consciousness of incapacity or of laziness or of both? Probably both, to a degree; yet I thought there must be a little more to it than that, because I had already caught myself pondering the question why these biographies had been written. I could not see that they served any purpose worth serving; they seemed to me to be addressed mostly to a vulgar and prying inquisitiveness; and this in turn led me to raise the questions which I subsequently put to my literary friend.

We finally agreed, my friend and I, that the legitimate function of modern biography (and a fortiori of autobiography) is to help the historian. We recalled the fact that biography, as now understood, is comparatively a new thing in our literature. Neither of us could put our finger on an example of it earlier than the seventeenth century. In principle, modern biography is an objective account of the life of one man. It begins with his birth, ends with his death, and includes every item of detail which has any actual or probable historical significance. All collateral matter which goes in by way of ‘setting’ should be cut down to what is in distinct and direct relation to that one man. In principle, above all, modern biography admits of nothing tendentious, nor does it admit of the puffing out or slighting of detail to any degree beyond what the author, in all good faith and conscience, believes the historical importance of that detail would warrant.

If biographical practice followed principle, obviously, fewer biographies would be written, far fewer autobiographies, and far fewer of either would be generally read; the only person likely to profit by them would be the historian. Things being as they are, however, commerical considerations intervene between principle and practice, as they always do. Publishers look with a jaundiced eye on a biography which in their view is not “readable”; and their view of what is readable is set by what experience has shown to be the terms of popular demand. The author, under a double pressure to produce a readable book—for most authors are not above some little thought of profit—sees that the satisfaction of these terms is quite incompatible with a devotion to principle, and proceeds accordingly.

Hence, as a rule, the actual practice of modern biography is heavily sophisticated in response to the extremely unwholesome terms of a lively popular demand for that type of literature. Like our practice of fiction, it aims to hit the lowest common denominator of taste and intelligence among its potential public. This procedure is bad. For the writer, it is bad in two ways. First, because it tempts him to pick subjects which, from the historical point of view, are not worth a biography; and this category, as I shall presently show, includes some of the most eminent names. Second, the current low conception of what makes a book readable tempts him continually to a culpable misplacement of emphasis among the various orders of fact with which he deals. To cite an extreme instance, some time ago I read a wretched misshapen sketch of a great musician’s life. All I got out of it which I did not already know was that this musician had the habit of using very filthy language. Evidences of this habit were scattered so overliberally throughout the volume as to make one think the thing had been written expressly to air them.

For the reader as well as the writer, the sophistication of biography is bad; and this also in two ways. First, because it acquaints the public, often with great overemphasis, with a variety of matters which not only are devoid of historical significance, but also are preeminently none of the public’s business. This stiffens the reader in his congenital resentment of privacy, his share in the vulgar assumption, so odiously overdeveloped in the United States and so powerfully encouraged by the dominant influences in our public life—the assumption that anybody’s doings are everybody’s business by full right and title. I do not speak of matters which might be thought questionable, but of those in general which are in their nature one’s own concern, and none other’s. If the subject “wore a checked shirt and a number-nine shoe, and had a pink wart on his nose,” he was within his rights; it was nobody’s business, the fact has no historical value whatever, and a disquisition on it, however “readable,” has no place in a biography.

Second, the vogue of commercial biography is bad for the reader because it fosters the erroneous notion that knowing something about a subject, or even knowing a great deal about him, is the same thing, or just as good, as knowing the subject himself; and here comes in the case of those biographers whose subject is simply not worth a biography, and will not support one. To know Thoreau, for example, is an inestimable privilege, and anyone may have it; it is got in the most direct and simplest possible way by reading his works, and it cannot be got in any other way. All that is worth anyone’s knowing about Thoreau can be got in five minutes out of any good encyclopædia. Reading the biographical portions of Mr. Canby’s recent book, therefore, if I may say so, makes one feel like Mr. Weller’s charity-boy at the end of the alphabet. Among other matters, for instance, Mr. Canby has dredged up evidence tending to show that Thoreau was not indifferent to female society; well, what of it? The fact, if it be a fact, has no historical importance; and either in liking the ladies or in disliking them he was quite within his rights, and it is none of the public’s business. It may be said that the curiosity stirred by this order of research will egg people on to reading Thoreau, and thus put them in the way of actually knowing him. This seems to me highly improbable; they are far more likely to rest on an Ersatz-knowledge vamped up out of what Mr. Canby tells them, and let it go at that. In fact, I suspect that the popular appetite for “readable” biography is symptomatic not only of a low and prurient curiosity, but also, when this motive is not dominant, of a wish to live exclusively on predigested cultural food, which no one can do. A passive and workless Ersatz-knowledge of illustrious men seems to me to reflect our national ideals of a passive and workless Ersatz-education, a passive and workless Ersatz-culture; ideals which we are beginning to see are illusory.

In the case of any subject, no matter how eminent, most of the minutiæ of his day-to-day existence are of no earthly importance to the historian. Even at this early date Lord Morley’s biography of Gladstone, a classical example, free from any taint of commercialism, reminds us that Time is a great winnower, and we are driven to wonder whether some other literary form might in general be more serviceable; or whether, as a compromise measure, an alternative might be found in amending our practice by laying down the rule that a subject’s private activities, his character, and his relations of whatever kind, are insignificant except as they affect his public activities, character and relations, and that the sound biographer should distribute his space accordingly.

Matters which are in themselves minutiæ may take on an adventitious importance to the historian by reason of consequences accruing from them to the public. There can be no doubt of that. Disregard of it is what has vitiated a great deal of earlier biography, and has led to the vogue of debunking, now happily on the wane. Unless the subject is contemporary, however, or nearly so, the biographer is in as good a position as the historian to understand this and to make all proper discriminations. A sound biographer of Priam’s son, for example, would anticipate the historian of Ilium with a pretty full account of his dairyings with the skittish Helen; so, mutatis mutandis, would a sound biographer of Louis XV, or of Napoleon III. On the other hand, none of the first Napoleon’s adventures in Mrs. Chikno’s “roving and uncertificated line,” though they seem to have been both enterprising and extensive, is worth a button to history, and therefore the sound biographer would finish off the whole assortment in about three agate lines. That George Washington was a man of sin—that he swore, drank whiskey, gambled, went to dances, infested the theatre, chased the light-o’-loves, smoked cigarettes, or whatever it was that the debunkers lay to his charge—this seems to have had no bearing on his public activities, and is therefore nothing for the sound biographer to waste space on. That he was a land-speculator and land-jobber did bear heavily on his public activities, and a sound biographer would take all due notice of it.

Matthew Arnold left an explicit request that he should not be the subject of a biography. No doubt his unfailing critical sense told him that there was nothing in the circumstances of his life to make a biography worth the paper it was written on. A recent effort made in disregard of his wish—and made, one must say, in execrably bad taste—shows clearly that this may well have been the case. Like Thoreau, he was a public figure in but one capacity, that of a man of letters. One may know him intimately and profitably through his works—there is no other way—but what one may know or not know about him is of no importance. Joseph Butler, the great bishop of Durham, took extraordinary care to baffle what we who are bred on the ideals of journalism and the cinema call “personal publicity.” All that is known about him is that he rode around his diocese on a black pony, rode very fast, and was scandalously imposed upon by beggars. Yet one may know Butler intimately, say through the Rolls Sermons, and thereby make a valuable acquaintance, even for these days of so much supposititious enlightenment on religious matters. I have often thought it is unfortunate that so many of us are contemptuous of “the old religion” without knowing the best that the old religion could do. Knowing the Goethe of the Conversations is an imperishable benefit, but how much is there to know about Goethe that is worth knowing or is anyone’s business to know? I think very little. Recent publications have settled me in the firm belief that one who knows Ruskin, Emerson, Coleridge, intimately, but knows nothing about them, is far ahead of one who knows all about them, but does not know them. Knowing Homer and Shakespeare is certainly something; but all that anyone actually knows about Shakespeare can be written on a postcard, and nobody knows even where or when Homer was born.

All I have been saying about biography bears with even greater force on autobiography because it is harder to assess the actual importance of one’s own doings and adventures in life than it is to deal in the same disinterested fashion with those of others. There is greater difficulty in drawing the line firmly between matters of legitimate private interest and those of legitimate public interest. My friend Mr. Villard’s recent book called Fighting Years is of great value to the historian of his period—I know of none more valuable—but only after Mr. Villard does finally get around to talking about his fighting years. What precedes this (counting in a few later lapses from objectivity) comes roughly to a fourth of the book; it deals with matters which are of highly justifiable interest to Mr. Villard and his family, to me and the rest of his friends, but which are of no legitimate interest to the public—they are indeed none of the public’s business. One wishes that Mr. Villard had resolutely forgone all notion of an autobiography, struck into his subject at the point where his fighting years began, and cast his book in the form of memoirs. As an inveterate reformer, if he had wished—as I think he might well have done—to show “how he got that way,” he could have done it easily in an introductory paragraph.

I have seen in my time—a rather long time, as man’s life goes—only one specimen of this type of literature which seemed to me flawless. One could do no better than let it serve as a structural model for both biography and autobiography, and I therefore feel justified in speaking of it somewhat at length as such. I came on it only lately, about six months ago. It is not the work of a writer, a man of letters, or even one of more than moderate literary attainments. It is the work of a Russian musician.

II

Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai Andreyevitch, commenced his autobiography in 1876, when he was thirty-two years old. He ended it in 1906, two years before his death. He worked at it at long intervals; ten years elapsed between the first and second chapters, six between the second and third, eleven between the seventh and eighth. He died in 1908; his widow brought out the book in 1909, suppressing certain passages, and a second edition came out in 1910. An English translation, said to be excellent, was made by Mr. Joffe from this second edition, and was published, I think in 1923, by Mr. A. A. Knopf. I have not seen it. A third Russian edition appeared in 1928, edited by the composer’s son, Andrei Nikolaivitch, who restored the passages which had been cut out of the two editions preceding.

Like Thoreau, Rimsky-Korsakov was in one capacity, and one only, a public figure. In all other respects his life, like Thoreau’s, had not a single feature of legitimate interest to the public. The first signal merit of his book lies in its clear, consistent consciousness that the public was entitled to the fullest information about everything which bore directly or indirectly on the author’s character and activities as a musician, and was not entitled to any information about anything which had any other bearing. The book’s fidelity to this sound principle is amazing. My copy of it runs to three hundred closely-printed pages, and I have scanned it line by line for some sign of departure or wavering, but I have not found one.

The domestic “setting” of the author’s birth and infancy is a matter of ten lines. His father played the piano (an old one) by ear; so did an uncle, who could not read music, but was “very musical,” though the father seems to have had the better musical memory. The author’s mother habitually slowed down the tempo of the songs she sang to him in his childhood; this was an “odd trait,” and the author has the notion that he may have inherited this tendency from her. This is all we are told of either parent’s biography. He does not mention the name of his father or mother, or say a word about their families or forebears. In the second chapter he gives his father a paragraph of praise, but it is only by way of showing that, in spite of their ancien régime distaste for a musical career, his parents disinterestedly did their best for him.

The author had a wife, “an excellent musician,” and has nothing to say about her in any other capacity. He does mention her name, but he had to do that in order to distinguish her from a sister who was a singer; she was a pianiste, and they often appeared together. He had children; the birth of a son gets half a line. They are brought into the narrative only as some incident—for example, the illness of a son or the death of a daughter—had this-or-that effect on some musical project which was under way. The incident itself gets bare mention; we do not know what ailed the boy or what carried off the girl. The author’s own indispositions are brought in vaguely to account for some difficulty with his music; “pain in the head, a feeling of pressure,” worried him at the Marinsky’s rehearsal of his fairy-ballet Mlada. There is collateral evidence that the author was genuinely fond of the four friends and comrades who had valiantly weathered through the terrible Sturm und Drang period of Russian music in the last quarter of the century; yet see how the book takes the death of the one perhaps closest to him:

On the sixteenth of February, 1887, very early in the morning, I was taken by surprise when V. V. Stassov came to my door in a great state of agitation, saying “Borodin is dead!” ... I shall not describe the emotion of us all. What would become of Prince Igor and his other incomplete or unpublished works? Stassov and I went at once to the dead man’s apartment, and carried off all his manuscripts to my house.

Twice, in going through the book, the reader may think he has caught the author napping, but he will be wrong. In the first chapter Rimsky-Korsakov has a bit to say about his love for the sea, and about an older brother who is a lieutenant in the navy. This seems irrelevant, but in the next chapter we find the author himself in the Naval College, on his way to becoming an officer; and this in turn is introductory to the account of sixteen years of effort to drive the two careers in double harness, and of the one’s reactions upon the other. Again, in the sixteenth chapter he waxes lyrical to the extent of nine lines, praising rural joys of the truly old-fashioned Russian village of Stelovo, where he spent the summer of 1880; but you see the point when you turn a page and discover that in those two-and-a-half months he composed the whole of Snegourotchka. Writing in the period 1894-1896, almost at the end of his life, he says that “up to this present time I have never finished off any work so easily and rapidly.” He recalled the delights of Stelovo because they had a conspicuous bearing on music. The trees, the river, fruits, flowers, the incessant song of birds—“all this was in some sort of harmony with my leanings towards pantheism, and my love for the subject of Snegourotchka.”

Another merit of the book, as great as the first, is born of the author’s clear understanding that its sole function is that of helping the historian of Russian music. Everything that would help the historian is there, and nothing is there which would confuse him, waste his eyesight, or arouse his distrust. To show that this is so would take more space than I can afford. I can only suggest that those who are thinking of doing something with biography should get a copy of the book and make a careful study of it from this point of view.

But to help the historian, the biographer must be objective; he must resolutely keep prepossession from laying traps for the historian’s feet. The third great merit of Rimsky-Korsakov’s book is that it perfectly meets this requirement; one does not see how objectivity could be carried further. This is the more remarkable, perhaps, because the book, like Mr. Villard’s, is a record of “fighting years.” It deals with a violent æsthetic rebellion which Mr. Ernest Newman, in his superb Musical Critic’s Holiday, admirably compares with the great Florentine revolt against musical orthodoxy in 1600; yet nowhere in the book can I find the trace of a single biased judgment, a single prepossession. I would have the intending biographer go through it once more, and study it carefully from this point of view.

A fourth signal merit is that Rimsky-Korsakov always “comes across.” He never butters up a person or a situation, and on the other hand, he never exaggerates anything unfavorable to either. He says exactly all that should be said, but never a word more. In this respect his work stands in vivid and gratifying contrast to all the attempts at autobiography that I have seen in recent years; they do not quite come across. The five Russian rebels were very young, going on for thirty; being young, they were ardent, irrepressible, aggressive. The leading spirit, Balakirev, was the only one who could pretend to anything like a professional knowledge of music, and he had next to none. Let the reader notice Rimsky-Korsakov’s treatment of Balakirev throughout, and especially the marvelous summing-up of his influence on his comrades. The others were rank amateurs; two of them were notable, however, in their proper professions. The half-French Cui was a distinguished engineer-officer in the army, and Borodin was a distinguished physician and chemist. Moussorgsky was an officer in the Preobrazhensky regiment, but presently left the army, and became a functionary in the civil service, in the Department of Forests.¹ Not one of them was a trained musician. They really did not know what they wanted, what they were driving at, and knew even less of how to drive at it. To deal disinterestedly with matters like these is something of an achievement—let the reader observe how Rimsky-Korsakov deals with them. Not a word is said about anyone’s personal character, qualities or habits, except as bearing on music; then what is said is said in full, and with complete objectivity. Balakirev went to pieces, Moussorgsky drank too much, Borodin’s household was in continual disorder; well, that was that, and its effect upon their productivity was such-and-such. Alone among critics, Stassov gave the rebels enthusiastic support; its effect was this-and-that. He had certain critical defects; the outcome of them was so-and-so.

III

Is it perhaps possible that our writers are overdoing biography a little? Is not autobiography, coarsened and discolored by commercialism as it is, being rather recklessly overdone among us? I fear so. I have before me now a letter from someone who proposes to write a biography of a personage whom I used to know slightly. The prospect depresses me, for to my certain knowledge that personage, like Thoreau, will simply not support a biography. The utmost that can be expected is that this intending biographer will produce, Gott soll hüten, one more “readable” book, one more windfall for the book clubs or a likely bid for the Pulitzer prize; and this, as Rabelais says of an enterprise essentially similar, is a terrible thing to think upon.

All the more so because meanwhile other literary forms, quite as respectable and far more appropriate, go begging. If some aspect of a subject’s public career strikes you as possibly fruitful, why not write an essay about it, as Mr. Brooks did in his Ordeal of Mark Twain? The essay-form is greatly neglected; yet a critical essay on Thoreau, for example, one such as Matthew Arnold wrote on Gray and on Wordsworth, would be worth a dozen inevitably abortive attempts at a biography. There are innumerable great essays to be written about great American figures as seen in the light of the present time. At this point in the course of our public affairs, for example, what would more powerfully conduce to a competent understanding of our political selves and our political condition than such an essay on John Adams as Walter Bagehot would write; or what more to a salutary sense of our spiritual decrepitude than an essay on Emerson such as Ernest Renan, Scherer or Sainte-Beuve would write—or, indeed, an essay on that same Thoreau?

If, again, you are interested in a subject’s standards of personal character and conduct, write a study of them. If you have been a close observer of great affairs, or of affairs which if not great are amusing, unusual, interesting, picaresque, write memoirs. The best and most useful book of memoirs that I ever saw was anonymous; the author almost never spoke of himself. It came out in 1892, entitled An Englishman in Paris. I wish Mr. Villard had done something like that; it would have had the ingratiating and persuasive literary quality which, owing to the autobiographical form, his work now falls just short of having. If your observations and reflections seem worth printing, print your diary; it is the best literary form for the purpose—Blunt’s diary and the Goncourts’ are gold mines for the historian. All these literary forms seem to me as sorely neglected by us as the biographical form seems sorely overworked.

But people will not read essays, memoirs, studies, diaries, and therefore publishers will not touch them, especially if offered by obscure or unpopular authors; people want biography. It may be a little indelicate to say so, but on this point it seems to me that the testimony of an author who is both obscure and unpopular might be worth something. All I have ever written has been in one or another of these forms, and I have somehow managed to get it published; and there is evidence that many more people read it than I would have dared think were likely to do so. Hence I am far from sure that this prejudice of public and publishers is as strong as it is supposed to be. I have sometimes wondered whether the book market would actually collapse if authors and publishers declared a general strike on the biographical form. I doubt it. I know a pampered cat named Thomas, who turns his back on any kind of food but liver, and will have none of it—for a while—but when he finds his choice dealt down to fish or nothing, he takes fish and likes it. On a similar choice, the pampered public might take something besides biography and get it down without too much retching. However that may be, publishers and authors might at least unite on the less radical measure of tightening up the practice of biography a little. If an author must write biography, let him write it on something like correct principles. If it is positively decreed in the council of the gods that he shall write an autobiography, let him write one like Rimsky-Korsakov’s.

¹Mr. Virgil Thomson, in his recent book, The State of Music, says that Cui was a chemist and Moussorgsky a customs official. This is a curious error, but trivial, hardly worth noticing, because the only point is that neither man was a professional musician, and Mr. Thomson makes this point clearly.—AUTHOR