American Men of Action

nteresting.
Haven't you, more than once, made up your mind that you wouldn't like a
thing, just from the look of it, without ever having tasted it? You know
the old proverb, "One man's food is another man's poison." It isn't a
true proverb--indeed, few proverbs are true--because we are all built
alike, and no man's food will poison any other man; although the other
man may think so, and may really show all the symptoms of poisoning,
just because he has made up his mind to.

Most of you approach biography in that way. You look through the book,
and you see it isn't divided up into dialogue, as a story is, and there
are no illustrations, only pictures of crabbed-looking people, and so
you decide that you are not going to like it, and consequently you don't
like it, no matter how likeable it is.

It isn't wholly your fault that you have acquired this feeling.
Strangely enough, most 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
m

John Addington Symonds (October 5, 1840 - April 19, 1893) was an English poet and literary critic. He was an early advocate of the validity of male love which included for him pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships, and which he would refer to as lamour de limpossible.

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