the art of biography

Question 1

biography compared with the arts of poetry and fiction, is a younger art

Answer 1

interests in our selves and in other people’s selves is a late development of the human mind

Question 2

not until the eighteenth century in England did that curiosity express itself in writing the lives

Answer 2

of private people

Question 3

it is that biography is the most

Answer 3

restrictive of the arts

Question 4

the novelist is free

Answer 4

the biographer is tied

Question 5

here is a distinction between biography and fiction- a proof that they differ in the very stuff of which they are made.

Answer 5

one is made with the help of friends, of facts; the other is created without any restrictions save those the artist, for reasons which seem good to him, chooses to obey

Question 6

[Lytton Strachey] for at last it was possible to tell the truth about the dead; and the victorian age was rich in remarkable figures many of whom had been grossly deformed by the effigies that had been placed over them

Answer 6

to recreate them to show them as they really were, was a task that called for gift analogous to the poet’s or the novelist’s, yet did not ask that inventive power in which he found himself lacking

Question 7

the biographer could not invent her

Answer 7

because at every moment some document was at hand to check his invention

Question 8

There was Queen Victoria, solid, real, palpable.

Answer 8

but undoubtedly she was limited. could not biography produce something of the intensity of poetry, something of the excitement of drama

Question 9

‘by what art are we to worm our way into those strange spirits? those even stranger bodies?

Answer 9

the more clearly we perceive it, the more remote that singular universe becomes,’ [Lytton Strachey]

Question 10

nevertheless, the combination proved unworkable; fact and fiction

Answer 10

refused to mix

Question 11

we can also be sure that it is a different life from the life of poetry and fiction- a life lived at a lower degree of tension

Answer 11

and for that reason its creations are not destined for the immortality which the artist now and then achieves for his creations

Question 12

Micawber and Miss Bates we may be certain will survive

Answer 12

Lockhart’s Sir Walter Scott and Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria

Question 13

The artist’s imagination at its most intense fires out what is perishable in fact builds with what is durable; but the biographer must accept

Answer 13

the perishable, build with it, imbed it in the very fabric of his work

Question 14

much will perish; little will live. and thus we come to the conclusion that he is a crafts man, not an artist; and his work

Answer 14

is not a work of art, but something betwixt and between

Question 15

yet on another level the work of the biographer is invaluable;

Answer 15

we cannot thank him sufficiently for what he does for us. for we are incapable of living wholly in the intense world of the imagination

Question 16

the imagination is soon a faculty that soon

Answer 16

tires and needs rest and refreshment

Question 17

but for a tired imagination the proper food is not inferior poetry

Answer 17

or minor fiction, indeed they blunt and debauch it, but sober fact, that ‘authentic information’ from which, as Lytton Strachey has shown us, good biography is made

Question 18

when and where did the real man live; how did he look; did he wear laced boots or elastic sided

Answer 18

who were his aunts, and his friends; how did he blow his nose; whom did he love, and how, and when he came to die did he die in his bed as a christian or…

Question 19

by telling us true facts, by sifting the little from the big, and the shaping the whole so that we perceive the outline

Answer 19

the biographer does more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save they very greatest

Question 20

for few poets and novelists are capable of that high degree

Answer 20

of tension which gives us reality

Question 21

but almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us more than another fact

Answer 21

to add to our collection

Question 22

he can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that

Answer 22

suggests and endangers

Question 23

for how often, when a biography is read and tossed aside, some scan remains bright,

Answer 23

some figure lives on in the depths of the mind, and causes us, when we read a poem or a novel, to feel a start of recognition, as if we remembered something that we had known before