ost 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 vitalized. Try it--try to see the man you are reading
about as an actual human being; make him come out of the pages of the
book and stand before you; give him a personality. Watch for his humors,
his mistakes, his failings--be sure he had them, however exalted he may
have been--they will help to make him human. The spectacle of
Washington, riding forward in a towering rage at the battle of
Monmouth, has done more to make him real for us than any other incident
in his life. So the picture that Franklin gives of his landing at
Philadelphia and walking up Market street in the early morning, a loaf
of bread under either arm, brings him right home to us; though this
simple, kindly,
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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.