BIOGRAPHY 



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BIOGRAPHY 



not been interested in the lives of other men; 

 but the earliest writings of this type were very 

 simple, like the accounts of the patriarchs in 

 the Bible. The myths and legends of the 

 Greeks and Romans were but brief biographies 

 of their gods and heroes, usually written to 

 bring out some one point of character. The 

 more formal biography was then, as it remained 

 fo r centuries, little more than an account of 

 the happenings in the life of a man; but never- 

 theless ancient Greece and Rome produced 

 some examples of biographical writing which 

 in their way have never been surpassed. The 

 Agricola of Tacitus, for instance, is beyond 

 criticism, while the parallel Lives of Plutarch 

 have had an influence on modern literature 

 which it is difficult to overestimate. 



The Middle Ages had little biography except 

 the lives of saints and martyrs. These works 

 did not strive for historic accuracy, and it was 

 not until the seventeenth century that biog- 

 raphy in the modern sense really appeared. 

 That an appreciation of the influence of such 

 writings did not take an earlier hold upon 

 the people is to be much deplored, for had 

 the sixteenth century felt the keen interest 

 that the twentieth does, in the lives of its 

 poets, for instance, the world would have much 

 valuable information which now it lacks. To- 

 day every "idle singer of an empty day" has 

 the minute details of his life chronicled in the 

 magazines, and of all writers of any note 

 exhaustive biographies are sure to appear; but 

 of Shakespeare, the world's greatest poet, there 

 is no biography not even so much as to make 

 absolutely certain that he was the author of 

 the plays ascribed to him. 



Important Biographies. Preeminent among 

 English biographies is Boswell's Life of Samuel 

 Johnson, and. second perhaps is Lockhart's 

 Scott. Forster's Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell's Char- 

 lotte Bronte, Cross's George Eliot and Tenny- 

 son's Life by his son are all excellent examples 

 of biographical writing. The most interesting 

 and famous American biography is of the type 

 known as autobiography the life of a person 

 written by himself. This is Benjamin Frank- 

 lin's Autobiography. 



Biographical material has also entered largely 

 into the writing of fiction. Sometimes a slight 

 sketch of some real person is introduced by an 

 author into his novels, as when Dickens in 

 Bleak House pictures Walter Savage Landor 

 and Leight Hunt as Mr. Boythorne and Harold 

 Skimpole; sometimes an entire novel is woven 

 about the career either of the writer himself or 



of some person prominent in public life. Thus 

 Goethe wrote of himself in The Sorrows of 

 Werther and Dickens made use of many of the 

 events of his own life in David Copperfield; 

 Meredith described in Diana of the Crossways 

 the celebrated Carolyn Norton, a granddaugh- 

 ter of Sheridan; Gertrude Atherton wrote of 

 Alexander Hamilton in The Conqueror, and 

 Maurice Hewlett gave a more or less distorted 

 picture of Lord Byron in his Bendix. In read- 

 ing such works allowance must always be 

 made for the fact that after all the author is 

 writing fiction and not biography, and there- 

 fore may feel free to take certain liberties with 

 his material. 



Biography for Children. If the teacher or 

 parent of a child ever hears him say, "I don't 

 like to read biography I don't care for 'lives' 

 of people," that teacher or parent may be sure 

 that the lives have simply been presented to 

 him in the wrong way. For everyone, young 

 or old, is naturally interested in "lives" if 

 they are shown him from the right angle. What, 

 jndeed, are most of the stories which so delight 

 children but biography, presented from the 

 point of view which appeals to a child? Blue- 

 beard, Dick Whittington and His Cat, The 

 Ugly Duckling, "fairy tales" though they may 

 be, are but biographies which the child feels 

 should be true, even if they are not; while as 

 regards less legendary heroes Joseph, Daniel, 

 David, King Arthur, the Cid, Roland any 

 child will listen to stories of them told over and 

 over again, and then ask to hear them once 

 more. 



We expect a child to like stories of these 

 heroes; we pick out the points that will strike 

 the child's fancy, fire his imagination, hold his 

 interest. But our attitude changes when we 

 come to consider other men whom tradition has 

 not marked as children's heroes. "Why," we 

 say, "should a child be interested in the Apostle 

 Paul? A boy or girl does not care particularly 

 for preaching and for missionary work." And 

 we forget that Paul had, if ever a man had, just 

 those experiences that children love to hear 

 about ; that he was "in deaths oft, ... in 

 journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils 

 of robbers, ... in perils of the wilderness, 

 in perils of the sea." Or we think again, "Of 

 course a child doesn't care to read about Dick- 

 ens or Longfellow or Hawthorne. Of what par- 

 ticular interest is it to him that one man wrote 

 The Tale of Two Cities and another man wrote 

 The Marble Faun?" 

 But even in those biographies which at first 



