American Men of Action | Page 2

than
Thomas Jefferson--the one is a flesh-and-blood personality, while the
other is merely a name. This is because the average biographer
apparently does not comprehend that his first duty is to make his
subject seem alive, or lacks the art to do it; and so produces merely a
lay-figure, draped with the clothing of the period. And usually he
misses the point and fails miserably 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,