Joseph Collins

“ Should Gerald Chapman have opportunity to publish his autobiography before he is hanged, we shall have a document rivalling in interest the greatest biographies of the past, for he would probably be able to display the sincerity of Jean-Jacques, the honesty of Benvenuto Cellini and the frankness of Dick Turpin. There seems to be no escape from the deluge, and it is probable that no escape should be wished for. There is no harm in writing one’s biography; it is the subject that one knows best and about which one is supposed to know more than any one else. ”

“ If a life is worth writing at all, no consideration of personal feeling or convention should deter the writer from setting down the facts; for on them truth, the greatest quality of art, is founded. Marie’s Journal is a work of art in the full sense of the word; it reveals a soul and a personality, it shows the extraordinary gift of its youthful author for writing, painting and music, but it also shows the disequilibrium of an imagination untutored and untrained. ”

“ He sought the ideal with the same ardour as man seeks the pleasure of the senses. He was a thinker, not a sensualist; a poet not a priest; a Pagan not a Christian; a genius not well poised who blazed the way for Burroughs and Muir and scores of others who have opened our eyes to the beauty of nature and have shown us how to appreciate and profit by familiarity with it. Personality defects fortunately do not long outlive the body. We quickly forget, when those we love are no longer with us, the things that annoyed us and we remember only their virtues. ”

“ Miss Marjorie Strachey has written the latest word in the line of fictional biography: The Nightingale; A Life of Chopin. She has blended the facts of his life with the romance of fiction. By a series of sketches, of fugitive evocations, she has added to the permanency of Chopin as a man, and especially as an artist. She has made his genius permeate his actions, and she has endowed him with the dream-qualities of poetry and the realised qualities of practical life. Chopin is no longer an unapproachable genius; he is life itself seen through the veil of romance. ”

“ It is the fashion among the famous artists and actors of our time to write their lives which, appearing while they are at the apogee of their success, promote their artistic and business interests, and reveal the personality of the writer at the time when his name is constantly in the eyes of the public. As Maria Jeritza says in Sunlight and Song there is no denying that reminiscences are fresher when “the laurels are green, and personalities and events described are alive in the public mind.” Why should an artist wait until his career is finished to write his memoirs? ”

“ A man of Berlioz’s temperament should not be judged according to any standard but his own; his soul was too sensitive to radiate happiness; his genius was of too fine a nature to leave place in him for self-appreciation and optimism; his tempers revealed his weariness of life and the extent to which life had conquered him; or rather they would in any one but Berlioz whose personality could suffer no comparison. ”

“ To blow the breath of life into the nostrils of a statue as Aphrodite did in answer to Pygmalion’s prayer is a remarkable achievement, but to lay bare the human soul so that he who walks leisurely may read, compares favourably with it. When a biographer studies a character in real life, or when a man writes his own life, he has opportunity, by masterful handling of the theme, to push into the darkness characters that have been built by the fancy of the novelist, and to make them appear by contrast lifeless and stilted ”

“ Biography is the story of a life, told by the man who lived it or by the student of it. Biography does not consist solely of a record of the events and adventures that constitute the actual and visual side of existence. It is not merely a chronological narrative of happenings, from which the reader may divine the inner and hidden qualities of the subject: it is primarily a statement of the subject’s thoughts and strifes, ambitions and realisations—and, as thoughts and ambitions condition action, behaviour and achievement, that which we call the “life” of a man flows from them. ”

“ Augustine with the same critical coldness of judgment that is brought to bear upon ordinary works of art or literature would be impossible. It stands alone among all the personal Biographies that have ever been written. It speaks to us, not like the ordinary narrative of a man’s life, but like a deep cry of agony; which, once heard, resounds for ever in our ears, imparting its own pathos to all music that we hear, and confusing our utterance when we would express the meaning that it wakens in our soul. ”

“ She writes with sincerity and quietness of the period which she devoted almost exclusively to work and painting; she was real enough in those days, but we miss the Marie who was neither peaceful nor fulfilled. We still feel, when we see her at rest or when we see her at work before her easel, the bond of æsthetic achievement between the creator and the created, between the writer and the Marie of the Journal; but we miss the charm of the Marie who flirts, dances, goes to balls where she looks like a Greuze shepherdess, who captivates every man and outshines every woman in the world. ”

“ One of the great charms of Osler was that he was so human, and had so much love and understanding of humanity. It is as a man that his friends remember him, and it is as man and teacher that he shall be known to posterity.
Thirty-five years ago a Yankee wagonmaker, who had gone to California as a “forty-niner” and piled up a fortune, thought to immortalise his name by founding a university in Worcester, Massachusetts. This University should be a beacon light to other educational institutions, the object of their emulation and envy. ”

“ The physical, intellectual and spiritual elements each in turn dominated his personality. The purpose of his life was to bring this trinity of forces into harmony and by so doing discover a new and deeper unity in the Universe itself. It is Mr. Fausset’s belief that he did not succeed in this purpose but the tortured history of such a genius lays bare the potentialities of humanity and of civilisation. His life was one long battle with death: the death of physical grossness and mental conceit, of worldly ambition and spiritual complacence. ”

“ This bigness of scope enabled him to group about her, as a rich background, the figures of those who were attached to her chariot with ribands of love and of admiration. The list of them is long; they were all intellectuals. Madame Récamier, though kind to every one, never attracted fools or bores, and her salon, which was the chambre d’accouchée of romantic literature, never sheltered a shallow mind, a cold heart or an uninteresting soul.
Only once was Juliette really so consumed with love that she hoped a divorce would free her—to marry Prince Augustus. ”

“ Next to poetry, biography is the most satisfactory reading for all ages: instructive to youth, inspiring to maturity, solacing to old age. Its human interest, its preoccupation with man, brings it close to our understanding and to our emotions: “Truth,” said Stevenson, “even in literature must be clothed with flesh and blood, or it can not tell its own story to the reader.” Hence good biographies are more entertaining and more edifying than books of theory or precept. It is not astonishing that the reading world should be constantly concerned with the manifestation of personality ”

“ It is useless to deny that he has some reasons to be proud. He has made his name synonymous with other things than success—his work is art, and his art has a method, a tradition, and a foundation in painstaking love, in culture and in thorough understanding of his craft. It is because Mr. Fuchs could have given us a book on the artist which would be something more than the creation of a social puppet that we complain. Many authors can tell us of royalty and the English peerage, but few can make a contribution to art. ”

“ They would gain in objectivity if they waited until the fading of their star; they would gain in charm and in honesty if their pens were not guided by fear of the impression they will make and how it will affect their career; and meanwhile they may weave into the work, at leisure, the interesting information that those who make history, literature or art should transmit to posterity, and that so often needs the shadows of death to veil and envelop it. ”

“ Or is he some Chinese poet-philosopher in whom mingle the souls of animals, and plants, and hermits sitting under an arbour near a little lake? There comes to this man as he listens to sounds beyond music, a music that is deeper and more ample than the music of his everyday life; he feels on his palate as it were a taste of immortality—it grows clearer than the clear morning about him. This beetle that buzzes by, this sweet flag swaying on the pond are like messengers charged with transmitting to him the friendship of men who have dreamed the same dreams in the depth of the old Orient. ”

“ He died within a very few years of the period when death comes to us all as a certainty, and I should esteem any man happy who lived till sixty-five as John Hay has lived, who saw his children marry, his grandchildren born, who was happy in his home life, who wrote his name clearly in the records of our times, who rendered great and durable services to the Nation, both as statesman and writer, who held high public positions, and died in the harness at the zenith of his fame. When it comes our turn to go out into the blackness, I only hope the circumstances will be as favourable. ”

“ She has written a biography which is as powerfully conceived as it is intelligently realised, and it can never be repeated too often that, above all, Amy Lowell was an intelligence. Her capacity for work was astounding; her painstaking and thorough study an achievement of labour that reminds one of the monks of the Middle Ages who spent their lives in cells and cubicles, illuminating prayer books with the most exquisite figures and colours, bringing to their task the patience of angels, the piety of saints and the skill of artists. ”

“ We have had nothing the past two thousand years that compares with the eight hundred years of unfettered thought which the human race enjoyed while Greek philosophy was supreme. That progress has ceased from the standpoint of emotionality is not so apparent, and this is the ray of hope that reaches us; for if it has not ceased, we can confidently look forward to a new code of ethics that will be livable, a new dispensation that will allow the sheep and the goats to pasture in the same field and sleep in the same shed, a new religion that will be reconcilable with science. ”

“ To have had a happy home in which unselfishness reigned, parents whose self-sacrifice remains a blessed memory, brothers and sisters helpful far beyond the usual measure—all these make a picture delightful to look back upon. Then to have had the benediction of friendship follow one like a shadow, to have always had the sense of comradeship in work, without the petty pinpricks of jealousies and controversies, to be able to rehearse in the sessions of sweet, silent thought the experiences of long years without a single bitter memory—to have and to do all this fills the heart with gratitude. ”

“ The novelist must be content to deal with the children of his mind, the biographer with the children of God.
As an art, biography is older than the invention of writing. Doubtless it has existed since the creation of man. In ancient times, it took the form of tradition, transmitted by word of mouth, which later became the foundation of legends and mythology. It has now reached a high degree of development; this is the best proof that man is unable to build his life on the present alone, or on hope of the future. ”