A Book for All Readers | Page 2

those personal experiences and
adventures, those traits of character, that environment of social and
domestic life, which form the chief interest in works of fiction. In fact,
the novel, in its best estate, is only biography amplified by imagination,
and enlivened by dialogue. And the novel is successful only when it
succeeds in depicting the most truly the scenes, circumstances, and
characters of real life. A well written biography, like that of Dr.
Johnson, by Boswell, Walter Scott, by Lockhart, or Charles Dickens,
by Forster, gives the reader an insight into the history of the times they
lived in, the social, political, and literary environment, and the impress
of their famous writings upon their contemporaries. In the
autobiography of Dr. Franklin, one of the most charming narratives
ever written, we are taken into the writer's confidence, sympathize with
his early struggles, mistakes, and successes, and learn how he made
himself, from a poor boy selling ballads on Boston streets, into a leader
among men, whom two worlds have delighted to honor. Another most
interesting book of biography is that of the brothers William and
Robert Chambers, the famous publishers of Edinburgh, who did more
to diffuse useful knowledge, and to educate the people, by their
manifold cheap issues of improving and entertaining literature, than
was ever done by the British Useful Knowledge Society itself.

The French nation has, of all others, the greatest genius for personal
memoirs, and the past two centuries are brought far more vividly before
us in these free-spoken and often amusing chronicles, than in all the
formal histories. Among the most readable of these (comparatively few
having been translated into English) are the Memoirs of Marmontel,
Rousseau, Madame Rémusat, Amiel, and Madame De Staël. The
recently published memoirs by Imbert de St. Amand, of court life in
France in the times of Marie Antoinette, Josephine, Marie Louise, and
other periods, while hastily written and not always accurate, are lively
and entertaining.
The English people fall far behind the French in biographic skill, and
many of their memoirs are as heavy and dull as the persons whom they
commemorate. But there are bright exceptions, in the lives of literary
men and women, and in some of those of noted public men in church
and state. Thus, there are few books more enjoyable than Sydney
Smith's Memoirs and Letters, or Greville's Journals covering the period
including George IV to Victoria, or the Life and Letters of Macaulay,
or Mrs. Gaskell's Charlotte Brontë, or the memoirs of Harriet
Martineau, or Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson. Among the briefer
biographies worthy of special mention are the series of English Men of
Letters, edited by John Morley, and written by some of the best of
contemporary British writers. They embrace memoirs of Chaucer,
Spenser, Bacon, Sidney, Milton, De Foe, Swift, Sterne, Fielding, Locke,
Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Gray, Addison, Goldsmith, Burke, Hume,
Gibbon, Bunyan, Bentley, Sheridan, Burns, Cowper, Southey, Scott,
Byron, Lamb, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, De Quincey,
Macaulay, Landor, Dickens, Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Carlyle. These
biographies, being quite compendious, and in the main very well
written, afford to busy readers a short-hand method of acquainting
themselves with most of the notable writers of Britain, their personal
characteristics, their relation to their contemporaries, and the quality
and influence of their works. Americans have not as yet illustrated the
field of biographic literature by many notably skilful examples. We are
especially deficient in good autobiographies, so that Dr. Franklin's
stands almost alone in singular merit in that class. We have an
abundance of lives of notable generals, professional men, and

politicians, in which indiscriminate eulogy and partisanship too often
usurp the place of actual facts, and the truth of history is distorted to
glorify the merits of the subject of the biography. The great success of
General Grant's own Memoirs, too, has led publishers to tempt many
public men in military or civil life, into the field of personal memoirs,
not as yet with distinguished success.
It were to be wished that more writers possessed of some literary skill,
who have borne a part in the wonderful drama involving men and
events enacted in this country during the century now drawing to a
close, had given us their sincere personal impressions in autobiographic
form. Such narratives, in proportion as they are truthful, are far more
trustworthy than history written long after the event by authors who
were neither observers nor participants in the scenes which they
describe.
Among American biographies which will help the reader to gain a
tolerably wide acquaintance with the men and affairs of the past
century in this country, are the series of Lives of American Statesmen,
of which thirty volumes have been published. These include
Washington, the Adamses, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Jay, Madison,
Marshall, Monroe, Henry, Gallatin, Morris, Randolph, Jackson,