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The Human Life has many of the faults which belong to his early school. It is, moreover, a very incongruous whole. The life of man is described by tracing the career of an individual made up of Cincinnatus, Lord Russell, Epaminondas, and Mr. Fox; who is represented, now at his plough, now in the senate, now breakfasting comfortably under "fragrant clouds of mocha and souchong," with his newspaper and all modern appliances, now rushing out with helmet and sword on a sudden cry of "to arms!" and dyeing a neighbouring stream with blood. But some of the detached pictures of life are full of graceful drawing, and forbid us to deny Mr. Rogers the claims of affectionate and tender, though not deep or passionate feeling. And he has this high title to respect, that he is genuine, and never affects or strains after a deeper vein of sentiment than is natural to him. We have quoted him often for his defects, let us quote him once for his beauties:

"Nor many moons o'er hill and valley rise

Ere to the gate with nymph-like step she flies,
And their first-born holds forth, their darling boy,
With smiles how sweet, how full of love and joy,
To meet him coming; theirs through every year
Pure transports, such as each to each endear!
And laughing eyes and laughing voices fill
Their home with gladness. She, when all are still,
Comes and undraws the curtain as they lie,
In sleep how beautiful! He, when the sky
Gleams, and the wood sends up its harmony,
When, gathering round his bed, they climb to share
His kisses, and with gentle violence there
Break in upon a dream not half so fair,
Up to the hill-top leads their little feet;
Or by the forest-lodge, perchance to meet

The stag-herd on its march, perchance to hear
The otter rustling in the sedgy mere ;

Or to the echo near the abbot's tree,

That gave him back his words of pleasantry—

When the house stood, no merrier man than he !
And, as they wander with a keen delight,

If but a leveret catch their quicker sight

Down a green alley, or a squirrel then

Climb the gnarled oak, and look and climb again,—
If but a moth flit by, an acorn fall,

He turns their thoughts to Him who made them all;
These with unequal footsteps following fast,

These clinging by his cloak, unwilling to be last."

That Rogers has a charm of his own no one can deny. Yet it is not easy to define it. You seem to have it on the surface of his poetry, and to lose it the moment you go deeper. It is the mark left by his peculiar power, which lay in a very uncommon refinement, perhaps a very rarely equalled refinement of taste and a keen exquisite sense of fitness: he had a wonderful control over all that belongs to words, except their meanings, and a marvellous art of arranging them so as to please both eye and ear, the former especially. Form is always uppermost with him, and the more so the more it is external; the traces of his power are found more in his verse and his diction than in his subject or his thoughts; and we have, as in his own Etruscan vases, wonderful grace and proportion of shape given to the commonest material. Utter poverty of thought is apparent in every page. A great poet pours wine into crystal vessels, Rogers occupies himself in staining them tastefully to hold toast-and-water. As we read him, we may stretch a point to say with Pope's father, "These be good verses;" but never can we say, "This is good poetry.'

139

THOMAS MOORE.*

[July 1856.]

Ir is the favourite notion of modern biographers that a man ought to be made to write his own life; that a vivid and faithful image can only be obtained, and can be fully obtained, from the self-delineation, conscious or unconscious, of the man himself, in memoirs or letters. This is one of those ideas which carry so plausible a self-recommendation with them, that they are accepted without examination; and it is not until they have been worked some time as undoubted truths, that, in the course of wear and tear, they begin to betray their alloy of error. The fact is, that though some degree of direct self-delineation may be necessary to supply any complete conception of a man, yet without accessory sources of information it can never be sufficient; and for this there are several simple and sufficient reasons. A man won't tell us all about himself, nor can he if he would. Even a man like Rousseau, who makes it his special boast to let shameless day into the most secret recesses of his life and heart, yet keeps a shade for the devouring cankers of vanity and self-love, which eat deeper and more festering sores than even his morbid taste can bear to probe. We all have two opinions of ourselves: sane men look at the better one, and shake off the terror of the other; and that occasional recurrence to it by which every now and then we balance our self-estimate is not a thing we can place at the disposal of those around us. Nor would we

*Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore. Edited by the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, M.P. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853-1856.

*

if we could. We can more easily bear to think ill of ourselves than to have others do so; and the allusion by our friends to faults of which we stand self-convicted, yet hoped were hidden, strikes us as one of the most flagrant forms of scandal. Besides we do not know all about ourselves more than any other we know; but we are not only the being we appear to ourselves, we are also in some sense what we appear to others; and though we should hardly be willing to exchange our self-knowledge for that of others, yet should

"The Gods the giftie gie us

To see ourselves as others see us,"

it would certainly add, however unpleasantly, to the gross amount of our information. Hence, when we read the life of a remarkable man, we wish to know not only what he chooses to divulge of what he knows of himself, or what he unconsciously reveals in his writings; we wish also to know what impression he produced on external observers. Moreover, if a biography is to be a work of art, we must have a biographer: the work must bear the stamp of a creating mind: the artist, as well as the subject of his art, must have a recognisable impress. Rembrandt looks out from the canvas on which he paints the portrait of some burgomaster, and it is the spirit of Claude that is infused through those serene Italian landscapes. Nothing but a daguerreotype can be a mere copy; and what a daguerreotype is to a landscape, are diaries and letters to a biography, an image true only of certain features, necessarily distorted in others, and not a work of art. But we like to have a work of art. We enjoy a pleasure from our sympathy with the creative spirit it displays, and we enjoy the reflected light thrown on the biographer. What would Johnson's life be without the naïve idolatry of Boswell? It is the salt of the whole, and gives the point to half the anecdotes. Moore himself notes down a happy case in point: "Boswell

mentions Johnson saying to him, one night when they were sleeping in the same room and conversing, 'If you don't stop talking, sir, I will get up and tie you to the bed-post. I mention this (adds Boswell) to show the faculty he had of placing his adversary in a ridiculous position." What would the story be without the comment? What should we have learned of this same Samuel Johnson from his memoirs and correspondence? Fancy eight volumes of them. We should have had not a monument, but a sesquipedalian sarcophagus. Sometimes, indeed, the individuality of the historian is so prominent as to give the leading characteristic to his work, as when Carlyle uses history and biography as wax on which to stamp the image of his own mind, or Defoe ascribes his own marked traits of character alike to harlots, pirates, princes, quakers, and cavaliers. We are not urging that a biography is always better reading than a diary, only that it has a completeness the latter never can have. Even where a man writes his own life, as no doubt he may do,―re-creates himself as it were, casts his own idea of himself into form,-such an image, though probably more exact, minute, and life-like than any other, will still be partial. As a man can never see his whole image in a glass, so he can never form a complete reflection of himself in his own mind. The external biographer meanwhile can walk round him; though he can never get quite close, he can gather up a thousand clues from the observation of others; fragmentary, and often, no doubt, delusive, yet still carrying with them on the whole, to a man of discrimination and imaginative insight, sufficient indicia of their truth or falsehood. From these and from his own experience, for the biographer does not occupy the most favourable position for the exercise of his art unless he has himself been intimate with his subject, a man of genius may form a more complete, and on the whole a more truthful, image of another than any man can give of himself.

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