“But what are the difficulties you spoke of?” I said.

“Why, in the first place,” said Father Payne, “a biography ought to be written during a man’s life and not after it—­and very few people will take the trouble to write things down day after day about anyone else, as Boswell did.  If it waits till after a man’s death, a hush falls on the scene—­everyone is pious and sentimental.  Of course, Boswell’s life is inartistic enough—­it wanders along, here a letter, there a lot of criticism, here a talk, there a reminiscence.  It isn’t arranged—­it has no scheme:  but how full of zest it is!  And then you have to be pretty shameless in pursuing your hero, and elbowing other people away, and drawing him out; and you have to be prepared to be kicked and trampled upon, when the hero is cross:  and then you have to be a considerable snob, and say what you really value and admire, however vulgar it is.  And then you must expect to be called hard names when the book appears.  I was reading a review the other day of what seemed to me to be a harmless biography enough—­a little frank and enthusiastic affair, I gathered:  and the reviewer wrote in the style of Pecksniff, caddish and priggish at the same time:  he called the man to task for botanising on his friend’s grave—­that unfortunate verse of Wordsworth’s, you know—­and he left the impression that the writer had done something indelicate and impious, and all with a consciousness of how high-minded he himself was.

“You ought to write a biography as though you were telling your tale in a friendly and gentle ear—­you ought not to lose your sense of humour, or be afraid of showing your subject in a trivial or ridiculous light.  Look at Boswell again—­I don’t suppose a more deadly case could be made out against any man, with perfect truth, than could be made out against Johnson.  You could show him as brutal, rough, greedy, superstitious, prejudiced, unjust, and back it all up by indisputable evidence—­but it’s the balance, the net result, that matters!  We have all of us faults; we know them, our friends know them—­why the devil should not everyone know them?  But then an interesting man dies, and everyone becomes loyal and sentimental.  Not a word must be said which could pain or wound anyone.  The friends and relations, it would seem, are not pained by the dead man’s faults, they are only pained that other people should know them.  The biography becomes a mixture of disinfectants and perfumes, as if it were all meant to hide some putrid thing.  It’s like what Jowett said about a testimonial, ’There’s a strong smell here of something left out!’ We have hardly ever had anything but romantic biographies hitherto, and they all smell of something left out.  There’s a tribe somewhere in Africa who will commit murder if anyone tries to sketch them.  They think it brings bad luck to be sketched, a sort of ‘overlooking’ as they say.  Well that seems to be the sort of