FROM PLUTARCH TO STRACHEY

4 2 Y F R O M P L U T A R C H T O S T R A C H E Y W I L B U R C R O S S Vol. 11, October 1921 Biography next to fiction is the kind of reading most people now like best. As I once wrote a book on the novel and have since written the lives of two humorists, I naturally go with the majority. But this is not the main reason. When a man (or a woman) accomplishes something worth while in art, letters, science, statesmanship , or business, I try to find out what I can about his life and personality. Behind this desire which I have with the rest of the modern world is more than mere curiosity. Life for most people is a rather di≈cult piece of business. So we want to know not only how others have turned the trick against fortune; we want to know also all the details of the game as they have played it. Perhaps we want to learn how to do the very same thing that somebody else has done – how, say, to write a novel like one of Thackeray’s or how to amass a fortune and die a philanthropist like Carnegie. Surely, too, we all have the instinct to vary and lengthen our own lives by living several other lives vicariously at the same time. Biography is thus a sort of Life Extension Bureau. A man who has read many biographies should have acquired a fairly good working knowledge of human nature, though he may never have mastered 4 3 R the Freudian psychology or wandered very far from a small university town. This modern love for biography, intense as it now is, is no new thing. Someone, perhaps, will some day write a little treatise and call it ‘‘The Development of Biography’’ after the name of similar books on the drama and the novel designed for college classes in literature and for those women’s clubs that consume whole editions of such handbooks. That man (or woman), who perhaps is living somewhere even now, may try to show how biography like fiction disengaged itself from history of the kind Herodotus wrote; but if he is wise he will come quickly to those wonderful Parallel Lives by Plutarch, some of which I have just read in the late Professor Perrin’s exact and beautiful English. If he be a Dr. Dryasdust , he will dwell on the fact that the Greek biographer gives few dates for the events he describes, and that there are no footnotes telling how the anecdotes concerning Caesar or Alcibiades or the rest can be run down to their sources. It must be a relief to Plutarch, wherever he may be, to know that, quite apart from hearsay and anecdote, many of the documents he used, have been lost beyond recovery, so that he can no longer be checked up at all points by the scientific historians of the present age. But Dr. Dryasdust even, though he may lament that he has no field here for the exercise of his gifts, will hardly fail to see how perfect is the art and workmanship within those limits that Plutarch set for himself. The historian of biography will have to tell about the impetus that Plutarch gave to biographical writing throughout Western Europe during and after the Renaissance, showing by the way how Vasari and Walton, for example, varied the art they learned from their master. He will probably say that these writers fixed the form of a biography which, though it still survives as in Mr. Strachey’s portraits of eminent Victorians, is really but an enlarged character-sketch with a brief summary at the end. He may turn aside to tell how the biographical method was taken over into hundreds of novels through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries . He will be tempted to write some interesting pages on death-bed scenes from Cleopatra to Colonel Newcome, closing with the remark that they are less frequent now, perhaps because 4 4 C R O S S Y death has been robbed of...