uch materials, this could be accomplished most fully by steeping
one's self in them, creating an environment closely analogous to the
intercourse of daily life. I believed that passive surrender to these
impressions, rather than conscious labored effort, would gradually
produce the perceptions of immediate contact, to the utmost that the
nature of the case admitted. Johnson doubtless was right in naming
personal acquaintance as chief among the qualifications of a
biographer; failing that, one must seek the best substitute. By
either method the conception of character and temperament is formed;
its reproduction to readers is a matter of power of expression, and of
capacity to introduce aptly, here and there, the minute touches by
which an artist secures likeness and heightens effect.

Whatever the worth of this theory, it was due in large measure to
revulsion from a form of biography, to me always displeasing and
essentially crude, which gives a narrative of external life-events,
disjointed continually by letters. Profuse recourse to letters simply
turns over to the reader the task which the biographer has undertaken
to do for him. Perhaps the biographer cannot do it. Then he had better
not undertake the job. A collection of letters is one thing, a
biography another; and they do not mix well when a career abounds in
incident. Letters are material for biography, as original documents
are material for history; but as documents are not history, so letters
are not biography. The historian and biographer by publishing
virtually contract to present their readers with a digested, reasoned
whole; the best expression, full yet balanced, that they can give of
the truth concerning a period, or a man. It is a labor of time and
patience, and should be also of love; one which the reader is to be
spared, on the principle that a thousand men should not have to do,
each for himself, the work the one writer professes. It is no fair
treatment to tumble at their feet a basketful of papers, and virtually
say, "There! find out the man for yourself."

The interest of lives, of course, varies, and with it the opportunity
of the biographer. I do not mean in degree, which is trite to remark,
but in kind, which is less recognized. There are men the value of
whose memory to their race lies in their thought and words, whose
career is uneventful. Yet even with them the impression of personality
is not as vividly produced by masses of correspondence