By Irving Browne.
CURRENT TOPICS. The Dim- of Biographers. — The New York "Tribune," in speaking of the sketch of Charles O'Conor recently published in this magazine, says : "It is unpleasant reading, as opening up the disagreeable contests which form the part of Mr. O'Conor's his tory which members of the bar are most unwilling to remember." This would be a fair criticism if it were any part of a biographer's duty to furnish pleasant reading regardless of truth. It is out understanding that this is not the duty of a biographer, but that his proper office is to tell the truth without regard to its unpleasantness. The writer seems to labor under an other delusion, namely, that it is no proper part of a biographer's office to remind any of the acquaint ances of the subject of the biography of anything which they do not like to remember about him. The view of biography thus taken by this newspaper writer would deprive biography of all value except as a sort of cosmetic art toward the subject, and a soothing syrup for his friends and acquaintances. This would do well enough for a bar meeting held over the de ceased, although even there it is less in fashion than it formerly was, and it was exercised very gracefully and charitably on Mr. O'Conor's behalf by his very eminent professional brethren. But the present generation of lawyers, who know nothing of him, should learn him as he was, not only as to his vir tues and talents, which were great and unusual, and which we endeavored to celebrate in the sketch as a whole, but also as to his weaknesses and unpleasant traits, which were public and troublesome. Mr. O'Conor would himself have despised flattery, at least post mortem, and would much have preferred justice. He never flattered anybody, nor probably meant to do anybody injustice, but it is his biogra-' pher's proper office to describe him as he was, and not as his contemporaries and admirers could wish he had been. Such a life as his is valuable as an example to be imitated in many particulars, to be avoided in some, and it should be fully and fairly summed up. In a later notice the " Tribune" writer says that " Some old grudge or some constitutional defect must render it impossible for Mr. Browne fully to appreciate the subject of the sketch." We are
not old enough to have any such grudge, and the constitutional defect is simply an incapability of in discriminate and fulsome eulogy. We wish to pro test against the sentimental notion that a biographer should slur over unpleasant things which were of great public importance and notoriety, and dwell at length only on the favorable aspects of a character. We did not make Mr. O'Conor, we simply find him. The "Tribune's" criticism strikes us as being as illfounded as would be a. complaint of a Chauvinist that Lanfrey's or Taine's observations on Napoleon are " unpleasant reading." This mistaken estimate of the biographer's office is also adopted by Miss Munroe, the woman who wrote that ode on the opening of the Columbian Exposition, in a criti cism on Professor Woodberry's recent Memoir of Poe, in the "Critic." That memoir is very temperate but very truthful statement of the career of that most wayward genius; but Miss Munroe sharply rebukes the writer for his want of " sympa thy " with the subject, and for furnishing so much "unpleasant reading." Perhaps Miss Munroe writes the " Tribune " paragraph — it is exactly in her vein. Mr. Woodberry's sketch is "unpleasant reading." but then he did not make Poe. We felt warranted in replying to Miss Munroe in the " Critic," as fol lows : — "His is an ungrateful task. To blame him for want of ' sympathy ' with his subject is like demanding of the stage-villain that he should ' assume a cheerful expression.' The hard facts of Poe's unprincipled life do not leave much room for the play of sentiment or sympathy. The ' mystic harmonies ' must be listened for in the man's writings, and not in his life. . . . The more ' Philistines ' like Woodberry and Leslie Stephen, who dare to tell the truth, the better for biography; and the sooner the world is disabused of the notion that vice is in any degree vindi cated by genius, the more sensible and the "better the world will be. Let us give fewer bouquets and Thanksgiving turkeys to felons and have less sympathy with bad men be cause they wrote pleasing verses and stories." Leslie Stephen will be remembered as the writer who dispelled the Alexander Pope legend, and showed him up as the spiteful little liar and backbiter that he was. Like him, we believe in painting Cromwell with his wart. 141
