American Men of Action | Page 2

because he concerns himself with the mere doing of deeds, and not with that greatest of all things, the development of character.
All great biographies are written with insight and imagination, as well as with truth; that is, the biographer tries, in the first place, to find out not only what his subject did, but what he thought; he tries to realize him thoroughly, and then, reconstructing the scenes through which he moved, interprets him for us. He endeavors to give us the rounded impression of a human being--of a man who really walked and talked and loved and hated--so that we may feel that we knew him. But most biographies are seemingly written about statues on pedestals, and not good statues at that.
I am hoping to see the rise, some day, of a new school of biography, which will not hesitate to discard the inessential, which will disdain to glorify its subject, whose first duty it will be to strip away the falsehoods of tradition and to show us the real man, not hiding his imperfections and yet giving them no more prominence than they really bore in his life; which will realize that to the man nothing was of importance except the growth of his spirit, and that to us nothing else concerning him is of any moment; which will show him to us illumined, as it were, from within, and which will count any other sort of life-history as vain and worthless. What we need is biography by X-ray, and not by tallow candle.
Until that time comes, dear reader, you yourself must supply the X-ray of insight. If you can learn to do that, you will find history and biography the most interesting of studies. Biography is, of course, the basis of all history, since history is merely the record of man's failures and successes; and, read thus, it is a wonderful and inspiring thing, for the successes so overtop the failures, the good so out-weighs the bad. By the touchstone of imagination, even badly written biography may be colored and vitalized. Try it--try to see the man you are reading about as an actual human being; make him come out of the pages of the book and stand before you; give him a personality. Watch for his humors, his mistakes, his failings--be sure he had them, however exalted he may have been--they will help to make him human. The spectacle of Washington, riding forward in a towering rage at the battle of Monmouth, has done more to make him real for us than any other incident in his life. So the picture that Franklin gives of his landing at Philadelphia and walking up Market street in the early morning, a loaf of bread under either arm, brings him right home to us; though this simple, kindly, and humorous philosopher is one of the realest figures on the pages of history. We love Andrew Jackson for his irascible wrong-headedness, Farragut for his burst of wrath in Mobile harbor, Lincoln for his homely wisdom.
I have said that, read as the record of man's failures and successes, history is an inspiring thing. Perhaps of the history of no country is this so true as of that of ours. By far the larger part of our great men have started at the very bottom of the ladder, in poverty and obscurity, and have fought their way up round by round against all the forces of society. Nowhere else have inherited wealth and inherited position counted for so little as in America. Again, we have had no wars of greed or ambition, unless the war with Mexico could be so called. We have, at least, had no tyrants--instead, we have witnessed the spectacle, unique in history, of a great general winning his country's freedom, and then disbanding his army and retiring to his farm. "The Cincinnatus of the West," Byron called him; and John Richard Green adds, "No nobler figure ever stood in the forefront of a nation's life." He has emerged from the mists of tradition, from the sanctimonious wrappings in which the early biographers disguised him, has softened and broadened into the most human of men, and has won our love as well as our veneration.
George Washington was the founder. Beside his name, two others stand out, serene and dominant: Christopher Columbus, the discoverer; Abraham Lincoln, the preserver. And yet, neither Columbus, nor Washington, nor Lincoln was what we call a genius--a genius, that is, in the sense in which Shakespeare or Napoleon or Galileo was a genius. But they combined in singular degree those three characteristics without which no man may be truly great: sincerity and courage and singleness of purpose.
It is not without a certain awe that we contemplate these men--men like ourselves, let us always remember, but,