ost biographies give no such impression of reality as
good fiction does. John Ridd, for instance, is more alive for most of us
than Thomas Jefferson--the one is a flesh-and-blood personality, while
the other is merely a name. This is because the average biographer
apparently does not comprehend that his first duty is to make his
subject seem alive, or lacks the art to do it; and so produces merely a
lay-figure, draped with the clothing of the period. And usually he
misses the point and fails miserably because he concerns himself with
the mere doing of deeds, and not with that greatest of all things, the
development of character.

All great biographies are written with insight and imagination, as well
as with truth; that is, the biographer tries, in the first place, to
find out not only what his subject did, but what he thought; he tries to
realize him thoroughly, and then, reconstructing the scenes through
which he moved, interprets him for us. He endeavors to give us the
rounded impression of a human being--of a man who really walked and
talked and loved and hated--so that we may feel that we knew him. But
most biographies are seemingly written about statues on pedestals, and
not good statues at that.

I am hoping to see the rise, some day, of a new school of biography,
which will not hesitate to discard the inessential, which will disdain
to glorify its subject, whose first duty it will be to strip away the
falsehoods of tradition and to show us the real man, not hiding his
imperfections and yet giving them no more prominence than they really
bore in his life; which will realize that to the man nothing was of
importance except the growth of his spirit, and that to us nothing else
concerning him is of any moment; which will show him to us illumined, as
it were, from within, and which will count any other sort of
life-history as vain and worthless. What we need is biography by X-ray,
and not by tallow candle.

Until that time comes, dear reader, you yourself must supply the X-ray
of insight. If you can learn to do that, you will find history and
biography the most interesting of studies. Biography is, of course, the
basis of all history, since history is merely the record of man's
failures and successes; and, read thus, it is a wonderful and inspiring
thing, for the successes so overtop the failures, the good so out-weighs
the bad. By the touchstone of imagination, even badly written biography
may be colored and vita