Mervin James Curl

Biography is of three kinds. First there is the purely dramatic, such as we find in the plays of Shakespeare, Barrie, and others, and often in novels of the more dramatic kind, which sets the subject to marching up and down before our eyes, with the gestures and the speech of life. Such biography sometimes covers a whole life, more often only a fraction from which we are to judge of the whole. From this kind of biography we draw our own conclusions of the hero; the producer sweeps aside the curtain, displays his people, bows, and leaves us to our comment. This is a most stimulating form of writing. The reader vicariously treads the Roman Forum, or fights under the banner of the great Alfred, or perhaps jostles in the surge of politics, or dreams an artist's dream, or even performs the humble chores of a lonely farmhouse. The personalities may never have lived except in the writer's brain, yet who that has read of Colonel Newcome ever lets fade from his list of friends that delightful gentleman? Who that has once met Falstaff forgets the roaring, jolly old knave? Stevenson gave witness that almost more than from any one else his courage and good cheer in dark days had caught fire from the personality of Shakespeare's heroine Rosalind. If these persons of the imagination can stimulate, how much more ought the subjects of the other two forms of biography to fire the brain, for they are usually taken from real life, are people who have faced the actual problems such as the reader is meeting, people who have perhaps flamed in a glorious career from birth to death or perhaps have gone quietly all their days. The second form of biography is purely analytical. It watches its subject, follows him through life, and only after this study sets down its words, which aim to state for the reader the meaning of the life. Such biography is illustrated in the brief analyses of Mr. Balfour and Mr. Hardy on page 148. Here the author is the logical thinker who draws the conclusions of careful meditation and says: such was the significance of this man, this woman. The third kind of biography, the expository, the kind with which we are here concerned, attempts to combine the other two, hopes to present the pageant of life which the hero lived, and especially to make an estimate of its importance, its significance. Some novels approach this form when the author stops, as Thackeray often does, to comment on the meaning of his people and their deeds. This kind of biography attempts to accomplish what Carlyle thought should be attempted, the ability to say, "There is my hero, there is the physiognomy and meaning of his appearance and transit on this earth; such was he by nature, so did the world act on him, so he on the world, with such result and significance for himself and us."

The Problem

The primary object of expository biography is so to build up before the reader's eyes the figure of the hero, so to cast against the background of life the warm personality, so to recreate the lineaments and so to give perspective to the whole that the reader will know the hero, will be able to grasp his hand as a fellow human being with the game of life to play, and will be aware of the significance of the personality to his times and to the reader himself. To paint the man is the pleasurable adventure before the writer. Sir Christopher Wren bade us, if we wished a memorial of him, to "look around" upon the arches and the high dim places of his cathedral. So the writer of expository biography must plant himself in the deeds and desires of his hero, must gaze steadily into his eyes until he discovers the center of his being, and must then set down the words, which, if well enough chosen, wisely enough fitted, will outlast the toughest stone. It is in lack of true comprehension of the hero's life that so many expository biographies fail to inspire the reader, in the failure to remember that the writer is not merely "silently expressing old mortality, the ruins of forgotten times," but is trying to catch and record a living force, to live as long as men understand it and are moved by it.

The chief duty of the biographer, then, is to discover the life-problem of his hero, to understand it, to learn how the hero came by it, how he tried to solve it, and what its significance is. Now this is much more easily accomplished with the personalities who have closed their span of existence than with those whom we know still living, with their answer to their problem yet incomplete. Few of us have what Mary Lamb said she possessed, "a knack I know I have of looking into peoples' real character and never expecting them to act out of it—never expecting another to do as I would in the same case." All the facts of personality, the hints and gleams and shadows, bewilder us at times with our friends, and we regret the lack of perspective that reveals the central life-problem. But when we turn to Julius CÆsar, to Jeanne d'Arc, to George Washington, or to some humble dweller of past days, we can see the life whole, can discover the heredity, the natural endowment, the surroundings, the changing deeds and the shifting acquaintances and friends that determined for the hero what the life-problem should be. With the truly remarkable advantage, then, of this central conception, we can fall into cadence with the stride of our hero marching against his problem and can picture forth the struggle and its significance.

In every biography there is this problem. Your hero is at "that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least," as Stevenson called life, and the manner in which the hero perceives the "imperious desires and staggering consequences" will determine the flavor of his life. To turn to Stevenson himself we find a white-hot flame of romance cased in a feeble wraith of a body, the heart of the man daring all things, romping through life a deathless youth before the problem of adjustment between body and spirit. Or take the compounding of that tremendous figure, George Washington—adamant integrity, the zeal which, if unchecked, would often have brought the house tumbling about his ears, the endless capacity for indignation, and with these the patience that left men well-nigh dazed and the self-control that made him god-like. Set him in the midst of the hurly-burly of a young nation as doubtful of itself as youth, as eager, as impetuous, as contradictory, with the forces of the Old World pitted against it and with many traitors in its fold. Then conceive the problem of forming wise conjunction between vision and accomplishment, between desire and restraint, and the life of the man is at once unified, centered, illuminated, and made significant.

The same result follows searching to the heart of any hero, high or low, and failure thus to reach the heart causes the pallid uninteresting heaping of details that mean nothing to the reader. No architect can glorify the horizon with the silhouette of a cathedral, nor can he even give a meaning to his accumulation of stone and mosaic and mortar, if he heaps here a pile and there a pile, rears here a chapel, somewhere else as fancy directs lays out an aisle, with no central problem of relationship. Nor can you dignify your hero's nature with a mere basket collection of the flying chips of life—a deed here, a word there, a desire at another time. First, then, discover the problem that your hero faced in the relation of his character to itself and to its times.

The Chief Aid in Solving the Problem

To discover the problem, really to understand it, requires as your chief tool imaginative sympathy. Without this your writing will leave your hero as flat and shiny as any conscientiously laundered piece of linen. You are to picture him in relief, in the round, to make him live again, step down from his pedestal, and put his shoulder alongside ours and speak to us. We read in a history that faces the necessity of condensation how William the Conqueror "consolidated his domains"—and it means nothing at all to us of stimulating individual value. We do not think of the recalcitrant underlings whose necks he had to force to bow, of the weary eyes that gladly closed at the end of a terrible day's work, of the frequent desire, which at times must be suppressed, perhaps at times gratified, to run a sword through an opposing subject. We forget, in other words, that William was a man, a personality, a bundle of nervous reactions and desires. But the writing fails, as biography, unless we do remember these things. It is in the discovery and understanding of these details and in combining them into a personality that our sympathy is required. No one should set pen to paper in the service of biography who has not a lively personal interest in his hero, who has not an open, loving feeling for him—saint or villain whichever he may be—and desires to make his reader, in turn, feel the hero's personality. The ideal biographer is he who can peep out through the eyes of his hero at the sights which he saw, can feel the surge of ambition, of love, of hate, the quickening of the heart at success, and the cold pallor of defeat. We have seen a grown person watch with cold eyes a child who wrestles with a problem of digging a ditch or building a dam or making a harness for the dog, gradually lose the coldness of indifference, forget the gulf of years, kindle to the problem, and finally with delight catch up spade or leather and give assistance. Until you feel a similar thrill of sharing experience with your hero, do not write about him.

Most of us really have this interest but we browbeat ourselves into a belief that a biography, especially an expository biography, must be dull. And, sad though we may be to admit it, most such biographies written for courses in literature or history, are—well, plain stupid. The lives are, to use Samuel Johnson's words, "begun with a pedigree and ended with a funeral," and the dull stretch between is a mere series of events which find unity only in that they all happen to the same person. Such writing is, truly, inexcusable; it is like the railway journey of the unfortunate soul who sees nothing but the clambering aboard and then the folding of the hands for a long dull jouncing until lethargy can be thrown off and it is time to clamber down again. Had the traveler but the insight, or the inclination, he would perceive that his journey is a high adventure spiced with a delicious flavor of challenge and reply. Just so you may find that the writing of expository biography has the charm of life itself. The patient clerk bends over his record sheet and attests the arrival, the departure, of lifeless baggage tossed from hand to hand, from car to car, piled up, taken down and set finally to rest at its destination. But you deal not with lifeless baggage but with the fascinating compound of flesh and blood, of desire and of will, that changes the face of the world. No mere matter-of-fact attitude here, but the perpetual wonder and joy at the turns and flashes of human personality. Rather than be a matter-of-fact man Lamb wisely preferred being a "matter-of-lie" man; the writer of expository biography finds that his material is of such a nature as to be more interesting even than lies. As Sir Thomas Browne said of his not remarkable life, "which to relate were not a history but a piece of poetry and would sound to common ears a fable."

Most of us find that the most fascinating study for man is Man. Not only do we believe that "man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave," but that while alive he is more alluring than anything else. We might conceivably even argue that Socrates advised "Know thyself" out of fear lest our curiosity about our fellows absorb all our effort. But so great is our fear of the formality of biography that we often belie our sympathy and think that only the large dim figures of the past, kings and potentates, who stride through mighty events, are possible for treatment. Our fear is false. Stevenson was again correct in saying, "The man who lost his life against a hen roost is in the same pickle with the man who lost his life against a fortified place of the first order." No life ever existed—absolutely not one—that was not capable of an absorbing expository biography. The true biographer never takes the point of view of the philosopher who said, "Most men and women are merely one couple more." Rather he knows that, however slight in the sweeping cycle of time a stick of striped candy may be, to the child who drops it into the gutter it is of more weight than a royal scepter. He knows, too, that the ordinary, respectable citizen, one of the "common people," though he never is subject to scandal like a villain and never molds kingdoms like the great figures of history, is nevertheless, in his quiet sphere, a fit hero for biography. He sees that to such a person the gaining, through patient years of toil, of a little homestead, is as great a victory as for an emperor to conquer a country, that to be elected moderator of the town meeting or president of the "literary club" is a large adventure. Barrie had the imagination to see that the day when the six haircloth chairs entered his mother's parlor as the culmination of a long campaign, was a day to her of thrilling adventure, of conquest, of triumph. And yet we are afraid that biography ought to be dull!

Fear of the formality of writing is often the cause of our making expository biography a mere combination of the succession of events which history shows and a few dull comments about the subject, instead of a real interpretation illuminated with the magic of sympathetic understanding. With this fear upon us we write as awkwardly, as lifelessly, as we deport ourselves at a reception where we forget the pulse of humanity and are clutched by the fear of—we know not what. Such a fear would palsy the hand of him who should attempt to weave even the treasury of facts in the following statement with an estimate of their significance. Writing of General Judah P. Benjamin, of the American Civil War, Mr. Gamaliel Bradford says:

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 Steamship Trenton, which was pounding its wooden hull to splinters on the reef, climbed into the rigging and cheered while the more lucky British boat Calliope steamed past on her way to safety in the open sea, we are thrilled with the fact that 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 the Calliope! 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 a Biography of these; which, under its title Natural History of Selborne, still remains valuable to us; which has copied a little sentence or two faithfully from 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.

The Process of Solving the Problem

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.

1. Defining the Character

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 as Justice Clement, Justice Shallow, Fastidious Brisk, Sir Politick Would-be, and of some of Scott's characters such as Poundtext, 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 York Nation[91] classifies William James by finding the 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 a liberal we 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 of liberal, the lavender of conservative. In a sentence like the following there lurks the possibility of overworking a point of view, of riding rough-shod over details that 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.

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 two useful 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.

2. Analyzing the Character

a. Heredity

When once we have defined the character, have found its class and to some extent its differentia, we can by analysis add 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, which is nevertheless so often thought of as worthy of biographical treatment.

b. Interests

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 a narrowly 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.

c. Beliefs

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 page 148, 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.

d. Friends

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.

e. Deeds

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 determine his 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.

The Use of Events in the Life

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:

a. Choice of Events

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 is how did 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 understand Robert 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 narrative presentation, 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.

b. Relation of Events to Personality

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:

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.

c. Relation to Society and Times

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 social standards 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 his Frederick the Great:

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

d. Rhetorical Value of Events

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.

The Problem of Telling the Truth

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 reach the 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 steady and 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.

The Danger of Making a "Lesson"

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.

The Rhetorical Form

Finally, the rhetorical problem of forming your material presents itself. First of all do not forget that all the charms of 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 plan you 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, and with 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.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH[100]

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 the journey 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's ferule. 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:—

One can fancy a queer, pitiful look of humor and appeal upon that little scarred face, the funny little dancing figure, the funny little brogue. In his life and writings, which are the honest expression of it, he is constantly bewailing that homely face and person; anon he surveys them in the glass ruefully, and presently assumes the most comical dignity. He likes to deck out his little person in splendor and fine colors. He presented himself to be examined for ordination in a pair of scarlet breeches, and said honestly that he did not like to go into the Church because he was fond of colored clothes. When he tried to practise as a doctor, he got by hook or by crook a black velvet suit, and looked as big and as grand as he could, and kept his hat over a patch on the old coat. In better days he bloomed out in plum-color, in blue silk, and in new velvet. For some of those splendors the heirs and assignees of Mr. Filby, the tailor, have never been paid to this day; perhaps the kind tailor and his creditor have met and settled their little account in Hades.

They showed until lately a window at Trinity College, Dublin, on which the name of O. Goldsmith was engraved with a diamond. Whose diamond was it? Not the young sizar's, who made but a poor figure in that place of learning. He was idle, penniless, and fond of pleasure; he learned his way early to the pawn-broker's shop. He wrote ballads, they say, for the street-singers, who paid him a crown for his poem; and his pleasure was to steal out at night and hear the verses sung. He was chastised by his tutor for giving a dance in his rooms, and took the box on the ear so much to heart that he packed up his all, pawned his books and little property, and disappeared from college and family. He said he intended to go to America; but when his money was spent, the young prodigal came home ruefully, and the good folks there killed their calf (it was but a lean one) and welcomed him back.

After college he hung about his mother's house, and lived for some years the life of a buckeen,—passed a month with this relation and that, a year with one patron, and a great deal of time at the public-house. Tired of this life, it was resolved that he should go to London, and study at the Temple; but he got no farther on the road to London and the woolsack than Dublin, where he gambled away the fifty pounds given him for his outfit, and whence he returned to the indefatigable forgiveness of home. Then he determined to be a doctor, and Uncle Contarine helped him to a couple of years at Edinburgh. Then from Edinburgh he felt that he ought to hear the famous professors of Leyden and Paris, and wrote most amusing pompous letters to his uncle about the great Farheim, Du Petit, and Duhamel du Monceau, whose lectures he proposed to follow. If Uncle Contarine believed those letters; if Oliver's mother believed that story which the youth related, of his going to Cork with the purpose of embarking for America, of his having paid his passenger money and having sent his kit on board, of the anonymous captain sailing away with Oliver's valuable luggage in a nameless ship, never to return,—if Uncle Contarine and the mother at Ballymahon believed his stories, they must have been a very simple pair, as it was a very simple rogue indeed who cheated them. When the lad, after failing in his clerical examinations, after failing in his plan for studying the law, took leave of these projects and of his parents and set out for Edinburgh, he saw mother and uncle, and lazy Ballymahon, and green native turf and sparkling river for the last time. He was never to look on Old Ireland more, and only in fancy revisit her.

I spoke in a former lecture of that high courage which enabled Fielding, in spite of disease, remorse, and poverty, always to retain a cheerful spirit and to keep his manly benevolence and love of truth intact,—as if these treasures had been confided to him for the public benefit, and he was accountable to posterity for their honorable employ; and a constancy equally happy and admirable I think was shown by Goldsmith, whose sweet and friendly nature bloomed kindly always in the midst of a life's storm and rain and bitter weather. The poor fellow was never so friendless but he could befriend some one; never so pinched and wretched but he could give of his crust, and speak his word of compassion. If he had but his flute left, he could give that, and make the children happy in the dreary London court. He could give the coals in that queer coal-scuttle we read of to his neighbor; he could give away his blankets in college to the poor widow, and warm himself as he best might in the feathers; he could pawn his coat, to save his landlord from jail. When he was a school-usher he spent his earnings in treats for the boys, and the good-natured schoolmaster's wife said justly that she ought to keep Mr. Goldsmith's money as well as the young gentlemen's. When he met his pupils in later life, nothing would satisfy the Doctor but he must treat them still. "Have you seen the print of me after Sir Joshua Reynolds?" he asked of one of his old pupils. "Not seen it! Not bought it! Sure, Jack, if your picture had been published, I'd not have been without it half-an-hour." His purse and his heart were everybody's, and his friend's as much as his own. When he was at the height of his reputation, and the Earl of Northumberland, going as Lord Lieutenant to Ireland, asked if he could be of any service to Doctor Goldsmith, Goldsmith recommended his brother and not himself to the great man. "My patrons," he gallantly said, "are the booksellers, and I want no others." Hard patrons they were, and hard work he did; but he did not complain much. If in his early writings some bitter words escaped him, some allusions to neglect and poverty, he withdrew these expressions when his Works were republished, and better days seemed to open for him; and he did not dare to complain that printer and publisher had overlooked his merit or left him poor. The Court's face was turned from honest Oliver; the Court patronized Beattie. The fashion did not shine on him; fashion adored Sterne; fashion pronounced Kelly to be the great writer of comedy of his day. A little—not ill-humor—but plaintiveness—a little betrayal of wounded pride which he showed renders him not the less amiable. The author of the Vicar of Wakefield had a right to protest when Newbery kept back the manuscript for two years; had a right to be a little peevish with Sterne,—a little angry when Colman's actors declined their parts in his delightful comedy, when the manager refused to have a scene painted for it and pronounced its damnation before hearing. He had not the great public with him; but he had the noble Johnson and the admirable Reynolds and the great Gibbon and the great Burke and the great Fox,—friends and admirers illustrious indeed, as famous as those who, fifty years before, sat round Pope's table.

Nobody knows, and I dare say Goldsmith's buoyant temper kept no account of, all the pains which he endured during the early period of his literary career. Should any man of letters in our day have to bear up against such, Heaven grant he may come out of the period of misfortune with such a pure, kind heart as that which Goldsmith obstinately bore in his breast! The insults to which he had to submit were shocking to read of,—slander, contumely, vulgar satire, brutal malignity, perverting his commonest motives and actions. He had his share of these; and one's anger is roused at reading of them, as it is at seeing a woman insulted or a child assaulted, at the notion that a creature so very gentle and weak, and full of love, should have to suffer so. And he had worse than insult to undergo,—to own to fault, and deprecate the anger of ruffians. There is a letter of his extant to one Griffiths, a bookseller, in which poor Goldsmith is forced to confess that certain books sent by Griffiths are in the hands of a friend from whom Goldsmith had been forced to borrow money. "He was wild, sir," Johnson said, speaking of Goldsmith to Boswell, with his great, wise benevolence and noble mercifulness of heart,—"Dr. Goldsmith was wild, sir; but he is no more." Ah! if we pity the good and weak man who suffers undeservedly, let us deal very gently with him from whom misery extorts not only tears but shame; let us think humbly and charitably of the human nature that suffers so sadly and falls so low. Whose turn may it be to-morrow? What weak heart, confident before trial, may not succumb under temptation invincible? Cover the good man who has been vanquished,—cover his face and pass on.

For the last half-dozen years of his life Goldsmith was far removed from the pressure of any ignoble necessity, and in the receipt, indeed, of a pretty large income from the booksellers, his patrons. Had he lived but a few years more, his public fame would have been as great as his private reputation, and he might have enjoyed alive part of that esteem which his country has ever since paid to the vivid and versatile genius who has touched on almost every subject of literature, and touched nothing that he did not adorn. Except in rare instances, a man is known in our profession and esteemed as a skilful workman years before the lucky hit which trebles his usual gains, and stamps him a popular author. In the strength of his age and the dawn of his reputation, having for backers and friends the most illustrious literary men of his time, fame and prosperity might have been in store for Goldsmith had fate so willed it, and at forty-six had not sudden disease taken him off. I say prosperity rather than competence; for it is probable that no sum could have put order into his affairs, or sufficed for his irreclaimable habits of dissipation. It must be remembered that he owed £2000 when he died. "Was ever poet," Johnson asked, "so trusted before?" As has been the case with many another good fellow of his nation, his life was tracked and his substance wasted by crowds of hungry beggars and lazy dependents. If they came at a lucky time (and be sure they knew his affairs better than he did himself, and watched his pay-day), he gave them of his money; if they begged on empty-purse day, he gave them his promissory bills, or he treated them to a tavern where he had credit, or he obliged them with an order upon honest Mr. Filby for coats,—for which he paid as long as he could earn, and until the shears of Filby were to cut for him no more. Staggering under a load of debt and labor; tracked by bailiffs and reproachful creditors; running from a hundred poor dependents, whose appealing looks were perhaps the hardest of all pains for him to bear; devising fevered plans for the morrow, new histories, new comedies, all sorts of new literary schemes; flying from all these into seclusion, and out of seclusion into pleasure,—at last, at five-and-forty death seized him and closed his career.

The younger Colman has left a touching reminiscence of him:

"I was only five years old," he says, "when Goldsmith took me on his knee one evening whilst he was drinking coffee with my father, and began to play with me,—which amiable act I returned, with the ingratitude of a peevish brat, by giving him a very smart slap on the face: it must have been a tingler, for it left the marks of my spiteful paw on his check. This infantile outrage was followed by summary justice, and I was locked up by my indignant father in an adjoining room to undergo solitary imprisonment in the dark. Here I began to howl and scream most abominably, which was no bad step toward my liberation, since those who were not inclined to pity me might be likely to set me free for the purpose of abating a nuisance.

"At length a generous friend appeared to extricate me from jeopardy; and that generous friend was no other than the man I had so wantonly molested by assault and battery. It was the tender-hearted Doctor himself, with a lighted candle in his hand and a smile upon his countenance, which was still partially red from the effects of my petulance. I sulked and sobbed as he fondled and soothed, till I began to brighten. Goldsmith seized the propitious moment of returning good-humor, when he put down the candle and began to conjure. He placed three hats, which happened to be in the room, and a shilling under each: the shillings, he told me, were England, France, and Spain. 'Hey, presto cockalorum!' cried the Doctor; and lo, on uncovering the shillings, which had been dispersed each beneath a separate hat, they were all found congregated under one! I was no politician at five years old, and therefore might not have wondered at the sudden revolution which brought England, France, and Spain all under one crown; but as also I was no conjuror, it amazed me beyond measure.... From that time, whenever the Doctor came to visit my father, 'I plucked his gown to share the good man's smile; a game at romps constantly ensued, and we were always cordial friends and merry playfellows. Our unequal companionship varied somewhat as to sports as I grew older; but it did not last long: my senior playmate died in his forty-fifth year, when I had attained my eleventh.... In all the numerous accounts of his virtues and foibles, his genius and absurdities, his knowledge of nature and ignorance of the world, his 'compassion for another's woes' was always predominant; and my trivial story of his humoring a forward child weighs but as a feather in the recorded scale of his benevolence."

Think of him reckless, thriftless, vain, if you like,—but merciful, gentle, generous, full of love and pity. He passes out of our life, and goes to render his account beyond it. Think of the poor pensioners weeping at his grave; think of the noble spirits that admired and deplored him; think of the righteous pen that wrote his epitaph, and of the wonderful and unanimous response of affection with which the world has paid back the love he gave it. His humor delighting us still, his song fresh and beautiful as when he first charmed with it, his words in all our mouths, his very weaknesses beloved and familiar,—his benevolent spirit seems still to smile upon us, to do gentle kindnesses, to succor with sweet charity; to soothe, caress, and forgive; to plead with the fortunate for the unhappy and the poor.