"Paint me as I am," said he, "warts and all." Yet, if we would have a faithful likeness of faces and characters, they must be painted as they are. "Biography," said Sir Walter Scott, "the most interesting of every species of composition, loses all its interest with me when the shades and lights of the principal characters are not accurately and faithfully detailed. I can no more sympathise with a mere eulogist, than I can with a ranting hero on the stage." (7)Addison liked to know as much as possible about the person and character of his authors, inasmuch as it increased the pleasure and satisfaction which he derived from the perusal of their books.
What was their history, their experience, their temper and disposition? Did their lives resemble their books? They thought nobly--did they act nobly? "Should we not delight," says Sir Egerton Brydges, "to have the frank story of the lives and feelings of Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Campbell, Rogers, Moore, and Wilson, related by themselves?--with whom they lived early; how their bent took a decided course; their likes and dislikes; their difficulties and obstacles; their tastes, their passions; the rocks they were conscious of having split upon;their regrets, their complacencies, and their self-justifications?" (8)
When Mason was reproached for publishing the private letters of Gray, he answered, "Would you always have my friends appear in full-dress?" Johnson was of opinion that to write a man's life truly, it is necessary that the biographer should have personally known him. But this condition has been wanting in some of the best writers of biographies extant. (9) In the case of Lord Campbell, his personal intimacy with Lords Lyndhurst and Brougham seems to have been a positive disadvantage, leading him to dwarf the excellences and to magnify the blots in their characters.
Again, Johnson says: "If a man profess to write a life, he must write it really as it was. A man's peculiarities, and even his vices, should be mentioned, because they mark his character." But there is always this difficulty,--that while minute details of conduct, favourable or otherwise, can best be given from personal knowledge, they cannot always be published, out of regard for the living; and when the time arrives when they may at length be told, they are then no longer remembered. Johnson himself expressed this reluctance to tell all he knew of those poets who had been his contemporaries, saying that he felt as if "walking upon ashes under which the fire was not extinguished."For this reason, amongst others, we rarely obtain an unvarnished picture of character from the near relatives of distinguished men;and, interesting though all autobiography is, still less can we expect it from the men themselves. In writing his own memoirs, a man will not tell all that he knows about himself. Augustine was a rare exception, but few there are who will, as he did in his 'Confessions,' lay bare their innate viciousness, deceitfulness, and selfishness. There is a Highland proverb which says, that if the best man's faults were written on his forehead he would pull his bonnet over his brow. "There is no man," said Voltaire, "who has not something hateful in him--no man who has not some of the wild beast in him. But there are few who will honestly tell us how they manage their wild beast." Rousseau pretended to unbosom himself in his 'Confessions;' but it is manifest that he held back far more than he revealed. Even Chamfort, one of the last men to fear what his contemporaries might think or say of him, once observed:- "It seems to me impossible, in the actual state of society, for any man to exhibit his secret heart, the details of his character as known to himself, and, above all, his weaknesses and his vices, to even his best friend."An autobiography may be true so far as it goes; but in communicating only part of the truth, it may convey an impression that is really false. It may be a disguise--sometimes it is an apology--exhibiting not so much what a man really was, as what he would have liked to be. A portrait in profile may be correct, but who knows whether some scar on the off-cheek, or some squint in the eye that is not seen, might not have entirely altered the expression of the face if brought into sight? Scott, Moore, Southey, all began autobiographies, but the task of continuing them was doubtless felt to be too difficult as well as delicate, and they were abandoned.
French literature is especially rich in a class of biographic memoirs, of which we have few counterparts in English. We refer to their MEMOIRES POUR SERVIR, such as those of Sully, De Comines, Lauzun, De Retz, De Thou, Rochefoucalt, &c., in which we have recorded an immense mass of minute and circumstantial information relative to many great personages of history. They are full of anecdotes illustrative of life and character, and of details which might be called frivolous, but that they throw a flood of light on the social habits and general civilisation of the periods to which they relate. The MEMOIRES of Saint-Simon are something more: they are marvellous dissections of character, and constitute the most extraordinary collection of anatomical biography that has ever been brought together.
Saint-Simon might almost be regarded in the light of a posthumous court-spy of Louis the Fourteenth. He was possessed by a passion for reading character, and endeavouring to decipher motives and intentions in the faces, expressions, conversation, and byplay of those about him. "I examine all my personages closely," said he--"watch their mouth, eyes, and ears constantly." And what he heard and saw he noted down with extraordinary vividness and dash.
