James Rice, and Stevenson's friend Ferrier--that's a matchless little
biographical fragment, Stevenson's letter about Ferrier--those are the sort
of figures I mean, the men who charmed and delighted everyone, were brave
and humorous, gave a pretty turn to everything they said--those are the
roses by the wayside! They had ill-health some of them, they hadn't the
requisite toughness for work, they even took to drink, or went to the bad.
But they are the people of quality and tone, about whom one wants to know
much more than about sun-burnt and positive Generals--the strong silent
sort--or overworked politicians bent on conciliating the riff-raff. I don't
want to know about men simply because they did honest work, and still less
about men who never dared to say what they thought and felt. You can't make
a striking picture out of a sense of responsibility! I'm not underrating
good work--it's fine in every way, but it can't always be written about.
There are exceptions, of course. Nelson and Wellington would have been
splendid subjects, if anyone had really Boswellised them. But Nelson had a
theatrical touch about him, and became almost too romantic a hero; while
the Duke had a fund of admirable humour and almost grotesque directness of
expression,--and he has never been half done justice to, though you can see
from Lord Mahon's little book of _Table Talk_ and Benjamin Haydon's
_Diary_, and the letters to Miss J., what a rich affair it all might
have been, if only there had been a perfectly bold, candid, and truthful
biographer."

"But the charming people of whom you spoke," I said--"isn't the whole thing
often too evanescent to be recorded?"

"Not a bit of it!" said Father Payne, "and these are the people we want to
hear about, because they represent the fine flower of civilisation. If a
man has a delightful friend like that, always animated, fresh, humorous,
petulant, original, he couldn't do better than observe him, keep scraps of
his talk, record scenes where he took a leading part, get the impression
down. It may come to nothing, of course, but it may also come to something
worth more than a thousand twaddling novels. The immense _use_ of
it--if one must think about the use--is that such a life might really show
commonplace and ordinary people how to handle the simplest materials of
life with zest and delicacy. Novels don't really do that--they only make
people want to escape from middle-class conditions, what everyone