nything 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