One Mighty Torrent - The Drama Of Biography

ONE MIGHTY TORRENT THE DRAMA OF BIOGRAPHY, h EDGAR JOHNSON STACKPOLE SONS NEW YORK CITY COPYRIGHT, 1937, BY EDGAR JOHNSON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK OR PORTIONS THEREOF, IN ANY FORM Printed and bound in the United States of America by The Telegraph Press of Hanisburg, Pennsylvania . . . a. great stream Of people there was hurrying to and fro, Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam . Old age and youth, manhood and infancy, Mixed in one mighty torrent . . . SHELLEY To Eleanor FOREWORD WHEN John Foxe quoted Ciceros words, the witnesse of truth, the glasse of times, it was of history that he was writ ing. But they are equally appropriate, in a way even more true, of biography. History is important only because it happens to human beings a Genghis Khan of the groundhogs would move ur hardly at all, or a Rhodes among the rhododendrons. Fabre can fascinate us with the social life and engineering skill of ants, spiders, and bees humanizing them a little in so doing but he would strain our attention if he tried to tell their history for even a hundred years. Without a living sense of personality suffusing its framework, the abstractions of history are only half-truths. Biography never lets us forget that the processes of history clothe themselves in human lives it is indeed personal history. That is why in recent years biography has been so enormously popular. Biographers portray their living fellows even before these have reached their middle years they turn a backward ex ploring telescope on all of time from the Pharaohs to Henry Ford. More men write the stories of their own lives than ever before, trying to see and understand themselves in relation totheir times. The Journals of Arnold Bennett, the Letters of D. H. Lawrence, the reminiscences of William Butler Yeats, are read eagerly parts of them may even appear in magazines. Biography steadily ex pands on publishers lists, almost rivalirig the novel, and a tre ii FOREWORD mendous public responds to its lure. Biography is no longer the possession of the hackwriter and the journeyman of letters it has become a serious and dignified realm of literary art. Very little has been done, however, to clarify the principles of biographical art or to reveal its function in reflecting and deepen ing our understanding of our human heritage. The few volumes that have been published, some of them excellent in their own realm, are mainly historical surveys of various periods in English or American biography or else studies of formal biography ex cluding all the variety of other forms. No critical work in biography has taken all this wealth for its province tried to re veal the intensity and vividness with which biography can light present and past, and how it does so. These I have attempted in the present volume. With such a range, encyclopaedic inclusiveness would be self defeating. Bold emphasis and omission must be our principles, not reduction to scale. And so, although we range far afield, drawing from all the forms of biographical writing, in each period we focus on only a selected few. It was tempting to consider including the Confessions of St Augustine, the Vita Nuova of Dante, Cellini, Casanova, and Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, Goethes Dichtung und Warheit, Thoreau, Emerson, and Haw thorne as revealed in their respective notebooks, Amiel, Gide, and many another. But ultimately I decidedto confine myself to English biography, although in a few places I have violated my own rule. It would be almost heresy, it seemed, to discuss letter writing without even mentioning Madame de SeVigne and in modern times I could find no satisfactory English rendering of tendencies represented in The Education of Henry Adams, some of the works of Van Wyck Brooks and Andre Maurois, and The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens. Even so, there were many inclusions in my original plan that had in the end to be discarded...