It is strange that biography should ever succeed. To reproduce any thing
that was transient and is gone, not by repetition as in a strain of
music, but by delineating the emotions it caused, is an achievement of
high art. An added shade of coloring shows you an enthusiast, and loses
you the confidence and sympathy of your cooler listener. A shade
subtracted leaves so faint a hue that you have lost your interest in
your own faded picture, and of course, cannot command that of another.
Even an exact delineation, while it may convey accurately a part of the
idea of a character, is not capable of transmitting the more volatile
and subtle shades. You may mix your colors never so cunningly, and copy
never so minutely every fold of every petal of the rose, and hang it so
gracefully on its stem, as to present its very port and bearing, but
where is its fragrance, its exquisite texture, and the dewy freshness
which was its crowning grace?
So in biography, you may make an accurate and ample statement of
facts,--you may even join together in a brightly colored mosaic the
fairest impressions that can be given of the mind of another--his own
recorded thoughts and feelings--and yet they may fail to present the
individual. They are stiff and glaring, wanting the softening transition
of the intermediate parts and of attending circumstances.
And yet biography does sometimes succeed, not merely in raising a
monumental pile of historical statistics, and maintaining for the
friends of the departed the outlines of a character bright in their
remembrance; but in shaping forth to others a life-like semblance of
something good and fair, and distinct enough to live with us
thenceforward and be loved like a friend, though it be but a shadow.
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