give one the sense of a man diving in sewers, grubbing in middens, prying into cupboards, peeping round corners.  To try as far as possible to surprise your hero, and to catch him off his guard, is a very different thing from being frank and candid.  I remember once coming upon the track of one of these ghouls.  He was writing a Life of a somewhat eccentric politician, and wrote to me asking me to obtain for him a sight of a certain document.  I forwarded his letter to the relatives of the man in question.  What was my surprise when they replied that the biographer was not only wholly unauthorised by themselves, but that they had written to him to remonstrate against his expressed intention, and to beg him to desist.  I forwarded the letter to him, and added some comments of my own.  The only result was that he replied regretting the opposition of the relatives, saying that the life of a public man was public property, and that he thought it his duty to continue his researches.  The book appeared, and a vile rag-bag it was, like the life of a man written by a private detective from the reminiscences of under-servants.  The worst of it is that such a compilation brings a man money, because there are always plenty of people who like to dabble in mud; and a ghoul is the most impervious of beings, probably because a ghoul of this species regards himself merely as an unprejudiced seeker after truth, and claims to be what he would call a realist.

The reason why such realism is bad art is not because the details are untrue, but because the proportion is wrong.  One cannot tell everything in a biography, unless one is prepared to write on the scale of a volume for each week of the hero’s life.  The art of the biographer is to select what is salient and typical, not what is abnormal and negligible; what he should aim at is to suggest, by skilful touches, a living portrait.  If the subject is bald and wrinkled, he must be painted so.  But there is no excuse for trying to depict his hero’s toe-nails, unless there is a very valid reason for doing so.  And there is still less excuse for painting them so big that one can see little else in the picture! Ex ungue leonem, says the proverb; but it is a scientific and not an artistic maxim.

One sometimes wonders what will be the future of biographies; how, as libraries get fuller and records increase, it will be possible ever to write the lives of any but men of prime importance.  I suppose the difficulty will solve itself in some perfectly simple and obvious manner; but the obstacle is that, as reading gets more common, the circle of trivial people who are interested in trousers and toe-nails and in little else does undoubtedly increase.  Moreover, instead of fewer biographies being written, more and more people seem to be commemorated in stodgy volumes; and further, the selection could not be made by authority, because the kind of lives that are wanted are not the lives of dull important people, but the lives of interesting