Chapter 19

There has been staying with me for the last few days a perfectly delightful person; an old man--he is nearly eighty--who is exactly what an old man ought to be, and what one would desire to be if one were to grow old. Old people are not as a rule a very encouraging spectacle. One is apt to feel, after seeing old people, that it is rather a tragic thing when life outruns activity, and to hope that one may never have the misery of octogenarianism. Sometimes they are peevish and ill-at-ease, disagreeably afflicted and obviously broken; and even when they bear their affliction bravely and courageously, it is a melancholy business. It seems a sad kind of spitefulness in nature that persons should have so much trouble to bear when they are tired and faint-hearted and only wish for repose. One feels then that it ought to be somehow arranged that people should have their share of trouble in youth or manhood, when trouble is not wholly uninteresting, and when there is even a sort of grim pleasure in fighting it; but when it comes to having no distractions, to being obliged to sit still and suffer with no hope of alleviation; when affection dies down like an expiring flame, and the failing nature seems involved in a helpless sort of selfishness, planning for little comforts, enjoying tiny pleasures with a sort of childlike greediness, it is a very pitiful thing, I remember an old lady who lived with her son in a small parsonage full of boisterous children. They were very good to her, but she was sadly in the way. She herself had lost almost all interest in life; she was deaf and infirm and cross. She was condemned to eat the plainest of food; and I used to see her mumbling little slices of stale bread, and looking with malignant envy at the children eating big hunches of heavy cake. It was impossible to give her any pleasure, and she had no sort of intention of pleasing anyone else. It was so difficult to see what kind of effect this dismal purgatory was meant to have on any human soul. She was not improved by suffering--she grew daily more callous and spiteful before one's eyes. One of her few pleasures was to sit in the garden pretending to be asleep, when all the family were out, and tell tales of the gardener for neglecting his work, and of the maid-servants for picking the strawberries. Yet she had been a shrewd and kindly woman once, and had brought up her children well. If she had died a dozen years before she would have been truly and tearfully mourned, and now when everyone tacitly felt that she had outstayed her welcome, she lingered on. She had a bad illness at one time, and when I saw her, for the first time after her recovery, in the family circle, and said something commonplace about being glad to see her so well, "Yes," she said, looking round with an air of malicious triumph, "they can't get rid of me just yet--I know that is what they all feel, but they have to pretend to be glad I am better."

And then, too, there is another type of age which is hardly less painful, and that is the complacent and sententious old person, intolerably talkative and minutely confidential, who lays down the law about everything, and takes what he calls the privileges of age, a sort of professional patriarch, ruddy and snowy-haired and wide-awake, a terrible specimen of a well-made machine, which goes on working long after heart and brain alike are atrophied. I have known an old man of this kind. He insisted on everything being done for his convenience. He breakfasted very late, and would allow no one to have any food earlier, saying that it did young people good to wait; that he had always done work before breakfast, and that there was nothing like an empty stomach for keeping the head clear. He would not allow the morning paper to be opened till he came down; and he sate an intolerable time after breakfast reading extracts from it, often stopping in the middle of a sentence because some other paragraph had caught his eye. He had a horrible way of saying, "Guess what has happened to one of our friends; I will give you ten guesses each"; and he would insist on all kinds of conjectures being hazarded, while he chuckled over the absurdities suggested. He took a frank pleasure in the death of his contemporaries, and an even franker pleasure in the deaths of his juniors. Then he had one of his long-suffering daughters to write letters for him, and would dictate long, ungrammatical sentences to her; but he would permit of no erasures, and letter after letter would have to be torn up and re-written. He made all the party walk with him before luncheon, and at his pace, the same little walk every day. I think he mostly slept in the afternoon, or read his banking book; his talk was almost wholly about himself, his virtues, his astonishing health, his perspicacity; and he used to lecture comparative strangers about their duties with incredible insolence. The clergyman's life was made a burden to him, and the doctor's as well. Though he was the most luxurious and comfort-loving old wretch, his great text was the value of Spartan discipline for everyone else. If any dish was not exactly to his mind, he would allow no one to taste it, send it away, and complain bitterly that even his simple wants could not be supplied. Even when he got more infirm and took most of his food in seclusion, he ordered the meals for the rest of the household; he could not bear to think of their having anything to eat of which he did not himself approve. He used to make everyone go to bed before him, and would even look into their rooms to see that they were not reading in bed. It was all so virtuous and sensible that it was impossible to argue with him, and I used to suffer from an insane desire to pull his chair away from under him while he sate lecturing the company about the way to attain old age. Here, too, it was impossible to see the purpose with which the unhappy old man was being encouraged by nature and destiny to this hideous and tyrannical self-deception, this ruthless piling up of the materials for disillusionment in a higher sphere. It seemed as if he were being by his very vigour and virtue deliberately trained for ineradicable conceit and complacency. If his relations came to see him, they were lectured on their inefficiency; if they stayed away, they were reproached for their want of natural affection. It seemed absolutely impossible to bring any conception home to him, wrapped as he was in armour of impenetrable self-satisfaction.

But the old friend of whom I spoke is entirely removed from either of these shadows of age. He is infirm, but not ill; he is infinitely courteous and gracious, grateful for the smallest kindness, determined not to interfere with anyone's convenience. My servants simply adore him, welcome him like an angel, and see him depart with tears. He knows all about them, and keeps all the details of their families in his mind. He never talks of himself, but has a perfectly genuine and unaffected interest in other people. He is endlessly tolerant and sweet-tempered; and sometimes will drop a little sweet and mellow maxim, the ripest fruit of sunny experience. One feels in his presence that this is what life is meant to do for us all, if it were not for the strange admixture of irritabilities and selfishnesses, so natural and yet so ugly, which lie in wait for so many of us. One of the most beautiful things about him is his tenderness. He talks of his old friends who have taken their departure before him with a perfect simplicity, while I have seen the tears gather and suddenly overbrim his eyes. He seems to have no personal regrets or hopes; but to have transferred them all to other people. Yet he does not keep his friends in mind in a professional way as a matter of duty; his thoughts are simply full of them. He does no work, writes few letters, reads a little; he sometimes smilingly accuses himself of being lazy; and yet his presence and his unconscious sweetness are the most powerful influence for good I have ever seen. He makes it appear unreasonable and silly to fret or fuss or fume; and yet he is shrewd and humorous, and enjoys the display of human weaknesses. He is never shocked at anything, nor ashamed of anyone. He likes people to follow their bent and to do things in their own way. He never seems in the way; he loves to have children about him, and they talk to him as they talk to each other. One has no sense of rigid morality or righteousness in his presence; it only seems the most beautiful thing in the world to be good and kind, as well as the easiest. I do not think that he was always a very happy man; he had an anxious and rather sombre temperament. He said to me once, laughing, that the lines:

"There's not a joy the world can give Like those it takes away,"

were, in his experience, quite untrue, and he added that his own old age had been like a pleasant holiday to him.

It is strange to reflect how seldom such a figure of gracious age has ever been represented in a book. I cannot recall a single instance. In Dickens the old are generally either malignant or hypocritical, or simply imbecile; in Thackeray they are either sentimental or of the wicked fairy type, full of indomitable relish for life. In Shakespeare they are shadowy and broken; in Wordsworth they relentlessly improve the occasion. What one desires to see depicted is some figure that has gained in gentleness and tolerance without losing, shrewdness and perception; who is as much interested as ever in seeing the game played, without being enviously desirous to take a hand. The thing is so perfectly beautiful when it occurs in real life that it is hard to see why it should not be represented.

XLV

I seem to remember having lately seen at the Zoo a strange and melancholy fowl, of a tortoise-shell complexion, glaring sullenly from a cage, with that curious look of age and toothlessness that eagles have, from the overlapping of the upper mandible of the beak above the lower; it was labelled the _Monkey-eating Eagle_. Its food lay untasted on the floor; it much preferred, no doubt, and from no fault of its own, poor thing, a nice, plump, squalling baboon to the finest of chops without the fun!

But the name set me thinking, and brought to mind a very different kind of creature, from whom I have suffered much of late, the _Eagle-eating Monkey_ by which I mean the writer of bad books about great people. I had personally always supposed that I would rather read even a poor book about a real human being than the cleverest of books about imaginary people; at least I thought so till I was obliged to read a large number of memoirs and biographies, written some by stupid painstaking people, and some by clever aggravating people, about a number of celebrated persons.

The stupid book is tiresome enough, because it ends by making one feel that there is a real human being whom one cannot get at behind all the tedious paragraphs, like some one stirring and coughing behind a screen--or even more like the outline of a human figure covered up with a quilt, so that one can just infer which is the head and which the feet, but with the outlines all overlaid with a woolly padded texture of meaningless words. Such biographers as these are hardly eagle-eating monkeys. They are rather monkeys who would eat a live eagle if they could catch one, and will mangle a dead one if they can find him. The marvel is that with material at their command, with friends of their victim to interrogate, and sometimes even with a personal knowledge of him, they can yet contrive to avoid telling one anything interesting or characteristic. The only points which seem to strike them are the points in which their hero resembled other people, not the points in which he differed from others. They tell you that they remember an interesting conversation with the great man, and go on to say that no words could do justice to the charm of his talk. Or they will tell you his views on Free Trade or the Poor Law, and quote long extracts from his speeches and public utterances. But they never admit one behind the scenes, either because they were never there themselves, or did not know it when they were. Or, worse still, they will say that they do not think it decorous to violate the privacy of his domestic circle, with the result that there comes out a figure like the statue of a statesman in a public garden, in bronze frock-coat and trousers, with a roll of paper in his hand, addressing the world in general, with the rain dripping from his nose and his coat-tails.

That is a very bad kind of biography; and the worst of it is that it is often the result of a pompous consciousness of virtue and fidelity, which argues that because a man disliked personal paragraphs about his favourite dishes and his private amusements, when he was alive, he would therefore resent a picture of his real life being drawn when he was dead; and this inconvenient decorum arises from a deep-seated poverty of imagination, which regards death as converting all alike into a species of angels, and which can only conceive of heaven as a sort of cathedral, with the spirits of eminent men employed as canons in perpetual residence. Thus it is bad biography because it is false biography, emphasising virtues and omitting faults, and, what is almost worse, omitting characteristic traits.

But it is not the worst kind of biography. The joy of the real eagle-eating biographer is to do what Tennyson bluntly described as ripping up people like pigs, and violating not privacy but decency; sweeping together odious little anecdotes, recording meannesses and weaknesses and sillinesses, all the things of which the subject himself was no doubt heartily ashamed and discarded as eagerly as possible. Such biographies give one the sense of a man diving in sewers, grubbing in middens, prying into cupboards, peeping round corners. To try as far as possible to surprise your hero, and to catch him off his guard, is a very different thing from being frank and candid. I remember once coming upon the track of one of these ghouls. He was writing a Life of a somewhat eccentric politician, and wrote to me asking me to obtain for him a sight of a certain document. I forwarded his letter to the relatives of the man in question. What was my surprise when they replied that the biographer was not only wholly unauthorised by themselves, but that they had written to him to remonstrate against his expressed intention, and to beg him to desist. I forwarded the letter to him, and added some comments of my own. The only result was that he replied regretting the opposition of the relatives, saying that the life of a public man was public property, and that he thought it his duty to continue his researches. The book appeared, and a vile rag-bag it was, like the life of a man written by a private detective from the reminiscences of under-servants. The worst of it is that such a compilation brings a man money, because there are always plenty of people who like to dabble in mud; and a ghoul is the most impervious of beings, probably because a ghoul of this species regards himself merely as an unprejudiced seeker after truth, and claims to be what he would call a realist.

The reason why such realism is bad art is not because the details are untrue, but because the proportion is wrong. One cannot tell everything in a biography, unless one is prepared to write on the scale of a volume for each week of the hero's life. The art of the biographer is to select what is salient and typical, not what is abnormal and negligible; what he should aim at is to suggest, by skilful touches, a living portrait. If the subject is bald and wrinkled, he must be painted so. But there is no excuse for trying to depict his hero's toe-nails, unless there is a very valid reason for doing so. And there is still less excuse for painting them so big that one can see little else in the picture! _Ex ungue leonem_, says the proverb; but it is a scientific and not an artistic maxim.

One sometimes wonders what will be the future of biographies; how, as libraries get fuller and records increase, it will be possible ever to write the lives of any but men of prime importance. I suppose the difficulty will solve itself in some perfectly simple and obvious manner; but the obstacle is that, as reading gets more common, the circle of trivial people who are interested in trousers and toe-nails and in little else does undoubtedly increase. Moreover, instead of fewer biographies being written, more and more people seem to be commemorated in stodgy volumes; and further, the selection could not be made by authority, because the kind of lives that are wanted are not the lives of dull important people, but the lives of interesting and unimportant people who have given their vividness and originality to life itself, to talk and letters and complex relationships; we do not want the lives of people who have prosed on platforms and bawled at the openings of bazaars. They have said their say, and we have heard as much as we need to hear of their views already. But I know half-a-dozen people, of whose words and works probably no record whatever will be made, whose lives, if they could be painted, would be more interesting than any novel, and more inspiring than any sermon; who have not taken things for granted, but have made up their own minds; and, what is more, have really had minds to make up; who have said, day after day, fine, humorous, tender, illuminating things; who have loved life better than routine, and ideas-better than success; who have really enriched the blood of the world, instead of feebly adulterating it; who have given their companions zest and joy, trenchant memories and eager emotions: but the whole process has been so delicate, so evasive, so informal, that it seems impossible to recapture the charm in heavy words. A man who would set himself to write the life of one of these delightful people, instead of adding to the interminable stream of tiresome romances which inundate us, might leave a very fine legacy to the world. It would mean an immense amount of trouble, and the cultivation of a Boswellian memory--for such a book would consist largely of recorded conversations--but what a hopeful and uplifting thing it would be to read and re-read!

The difficulty is that to a perceptive man--and none but a man of the finest perception could do it,--an eagle-eating eagle, in fact--it would seem a ghoulish and a treacherous business. He would feel like an interviewer and like a spy. It would have to be done in a noble, self-denying sort of secrecy, amassing and recording day by day; and he would never be able to let his hero suspect what was happening, or the gracious spontaneity would vanish; for the essence of such a life and such talk as I have described is that they should be wholly frank and unconsidered; and the thought of the presence of the note-taking spectator would overshadow its radiance at once.

There is a task for a patient, unambitious, perceptive man! He must be a man of infinite leisure, and he must be ready to take a large risk of disappointment; for he must outlive his subject, and he must be willing to sacrifice all other opportunities of artistic creation. But he might write one of the great books of the world, and win a secure seat upon the Muses' Hill.

XLVI

I have been reading all the old Shelley literature lately, Hogg and Trelawny and Medwin and Mrs. Shelley, and that terrible piece of analysis, _The Real Shelley_. Hogg's _Life of Shelley_ is an incomparable book; I should put it in the first class of biographies without hesitation. Of course, it is only a fragment; and much of it is frankly devoted to the sayings and doings of Hogg; it is none the worse for that. It is an intensely humorous book, in the first place. There are marvellous episodes in it, splendid extravaganzas like the story of Hogg's stay in Dublin, where he locked the door of his bedroom for security, and the boy Pat crept through the panel of the door to get his boots and keep them from him, and a man in the room below pushed up a plank in the floor that he might converse, not with Hogg, but with the man in the room above him; there is the anecdote of the little banker who was convinced that Wordsworth was a poet because he had trained himself to write in the dark if he woke up and had an inspiration. There is the story of the Chevalier D'Arblay, and his departure to France; and the description of his correspondence, in which he said for years that he was inconsolable and suffering inconceivable anguish at being obliged to absent himself from his wife; yet never able to assign any reason for his stay. Then, too, the whole book is written in the freshest and most crisp style, with a rare zest, that gives the effect of the conversation of an irrepressibly impudent and delightful person. The picture of Shelley himself is delightfully drawn; it is a perfect mixture of rapturous admiration of Shelley's fine qualities, with an acute perception of his absurdities. The picture of Shelley at Oxford, asleep before the fire, toasting his little curly head in the heat, or reading the _Iliad_ by the glow of the embers, seems to bring one nearer to the poet than anything else that is recorded of him. I cannot think why the book is not more universally known; it seems to me one of the freshest pieces of biography in the language.

Trelawny's Memorials are interesting, and contain the solemn and memorable scene of the cremation of Shelley's remains--one of the most vivid and impressive narratives I know. Then there are the chapters of Leigh Hunt's Autobiography which deal with Shelley, a little overwrought perhaps, but real biography for all that, and interesting as bringing out the contrast between the simplicity and generosity of Shelley and the affectation, bad breeding, and unscrupulous selfishness of Byron. Medwin's Biography and Mrs. Shelley's Memorials are worthless, because they attempt to idealise and deify the poet; and then there is _The Real Shelley_, which is like a tedious legal cross-examination of a highly imaginative and sensitive creature by a shrewd and boisterous barrister.