The reason why such realism is bad art is not because the details are
untrue, but because the proportion is wrong. One cannot tell everything
in a biography, unless one is prepared to write on the scale of a
volume for each week of the hero's life. The art of the biographer is
to select what is salient and typical, not what is abnormal and
negligible; what he should aim at is to suggest, by skilful touches, a
living portrait. If the subject is bald and wrinkled, he must be
painted so. But there is no excuse for trying to depict his hero's
toe-nails, unless there is a very valid reason for doing so. And there
is still less excuse for painting them so big that one can see little
else in the picture! _Ex ungue leonem_, says the proverb; but it is a
scientific and not an artistic maxim.
One sometimes wonders what will be the future of biographies; how, as
libraries get fuller and records increase, it will be possible ever to
write the lives of any but men of prime importance. I suppose the
difficulty will solve itself in some perfectly simple and obvious
manner; but the obstacle is that, as reading gets more common, the
circle of trivial people who are interested in trousers and toe-nails
and in little else does undoubtedly increase. Moreover, instead of
fewer biographies being written, more and more people seem to be
commemorated in stodgy volumes; and further, the selection could not be
made by authority, because the kind of lives that are wanted are not
the lives of dull important people, but the lives of interesting and
unimportant people who have given their vividness and originality to
life itself, to talk and letters and complex relationships; we do not
want the lives of people who have prosed on platforms and bawled at the
openings of bazaars.
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