Andre maurois aspects of biography definition

by André Maurois. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 12mo. x+ pp. $

Now that the readers and the writers of biography have become almost equally numerous, this book, by an acknowledged master in the modern school of his art, ought to find a large public. The readers will want to know how the thing is done, the writers how to do it themselves. To both these classes M. Maurois has something to say that is worth saying, and heeding.

First of all, he recognizes clearly the distinction between a Victorian and a modern biography — the one ‘above all things a document,’ the other ‘above all things a work of art.’ His eye is open to the merits and to the defects of both. Nowhere does he utter a truer word than when he says, ‘A bad Victorian biography is a formless mass of ill-digested matter; a had modern biography is a book of spurious fame animated by a would-be ironic spirit which is merely cruel and shallow.’ His opening chapter on modern biography — the branch of the craft in which his own Ariel and Disraeli entitle him to the most respectful of hearings— is followed by five others, dealing in turn with biography as a work of art, as a science, as a means of expression,—that is, of self-expression, — with autobiography, and with biography and the novel.

In this narrow space it is impossible even to suggest in any detail the author’s manner of dealing with these various aspects of his subject. His approach to them all is that of a man well versed not only in the practice but also in the history of biography. As the book had its origin in a series of six lectures delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, under the Clark Foundation for studies in English literature, it is altogether appropriate that English biography has provided the text for most of his Observations. In this field he shows himself more thoroughly at home than one could have imagined a Continental to be.

It is not surprising that in Mr. Lytton Strachey M. Maurois finds the chief practitioner and exemplar of the type of English biography which he most admires. Of Mr. Strachey’s method in general he says, with a wisdom beyond cavil, that ‘if . . . it is applied by writers lacking in human sympathy and in psychological perception, its effects are simply those of rather low comedy. Some of Mr. Strachey’s disciples who do not share his profound knowledge of men and things have quite frankly used his recipes. Instead of choosing as the heroes of their biographies “great men so that we might imitate their virtues, they have been content with contemptible men, so that we might laugh at their follies.”Some of these books make one regret the old Life and Letters in two volumes.’ Amen, and amen!

Quotations might be multiplied indefinitely. One would like especially to show forth the author’s views on the choice of a subject, his belief in the rule of consistently following a chronological order, his reasons for questioning the possibility of an authentic autobiography. But the book is short — it takes far less time to read six lectures than to deliver them at the pace of an hour each — and it is readily accessible. Both readers and writers of biography will do well to scan and ponder it.

A single word of regret must be spoken — that the methods of American publishing, methods confined to no single house, seem to require a charge of two dollars for a book which can be bought in French, imported, for something like eighty cents. Must the expense of translation and binding in boards, and of American printing, so much more than double the cost of a book that really deserves a wide distribution?

M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE