ABSTRACT
The public inclination for biographies seems to have received unusual satisfaction during the past year. It is perhaps a good symptom, among the many bad ones of contemporary literature, that the potent flood of gossip with which we were for a time swamped, and which led most of the best known ladies who delight us on the stage to believe themselves equally fascinating in the library, has to some extent ceased, – perhaps only by natural exhaustion of material, perhaps, let us hope, from exhaustion of a different kind on the part of the reader. The washy stream of recollection and reminiscence has anyhow, if only temporarily, dried up, and in place of that deluge of dishwater we have the more nourishing fare of a number of memoirs of which we can scarcely say that any is unnecessary, though perhaps the world did not exactly clamour for the information presented to them in each. We should ourselves be slow to restrain the art of Biography, especially if it were ever to become a real art, pursued by those who can do it, and avoided by those without skill or perception in that way, – which, however, is past praying for, we fear. The kindred art of Portrait-painting is a fine art, too, but we cannot keep it from invasions of the incapable – every man who knows how to put paint on canvas having a conviction that he can at least ‘take a likeness,’ if he can do nothing else. But it requires no mean talent even to ‘take a likeness,’ and it requires a very high one to make such a portrait of either man or woman as shall represent them without flattery, yet without depreciation as they are. Truth to tell, it is the depreciation which is most to be guarded against. We know an instance of a portrait where everything has been done to flatter the sitter, who is represented as a younger, prettier person than she has any claim to be: but the flattery has done the lady grievous wrong by taking all the distinction from her individuality, along with the meaning, the feeling, the something more than beauty, which is really in her face.
