There may be something good in all this;
but it is all quite out of place: it is simply not biography. The
foundation of most biographical sins is, perhaps, ambition,--an ambition
to do something more or something other than the subject demands, and
to pitch the strain in too high a key. Hence we have usually found the
memoirs of comparatively insignificant men to be better reading, and
more fertile in suggestion, than those of what are called great men. Not
that the real life, as he lived it, of a man of mediocrity has in itself
more seeds of thought than that of a hero. Far otherwise. But his
written life has often greater lessons of wisdom for us, precisely
because it is generally found to give us more of the individual, and
more of our common humanity,--which is the very thing we want. There is
less of pretext to pour this one small drop into the broad ocean, and
then treat us to a vague essay on salt-water. What is it, for instance,
that gives to Southey's "Life of Nelson" its great excellence? There
have been many other works on the same subject, larger, fuller, and more
carefully studied. But these will perish, while that will be cherished
by all the generations to come. It is because the author kept throughout
precisely on a level with his subject. He was conscious, on every page,
that he was writing of one man,--that nothing was trivial which could
throw light on this man, and nothing important which did not tend
directly to the same end.
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