superstition that many people have about biographies, as if the departed spirit would be vexed by anything which isn’t a compliment.  I suppose it is partly this—­that many people are ill-bred, glum, and suspicious, and can’t bear the idea of their faults being recorded.  They hate all frankness:  and so when anything frank gets written, they talk about violating sacred confidences, and about shameless exposures.  It is really that we are all horribly uncivilised, and can’t bear to give ourselves away, or to be given away.  Of course we don’t want biographies of merely selfish, stupid, brutal, ill-bred men—­but everyone ought to be thankful when a life can be told frankly, and when there’s enough that is good and beautiful to make it worth telling.

“But, as I said, the thing can’t be done, unless it is written to a great extent in a man’s lifetime.  Conversation is a very difficult thing to remember—­it can’t be remembered afterwards—­it needs notes at the time:  and few people’s talk is worth recording; and even if it is, people are a little ashamed of doing it—­there seems something treacherous about it:  but it ought to be done, for all that!  You don’t want so very much of it—­I don’t suppose that Boswell has got down a millionth part of all Johnson said—­you just want specimens—­enough to give the feeling of it and the quality of it.  One doesn’t want immensely long biographies—­just enough to make you feel that you have seen a man and sat with him and heard him talk—­and the kind of way in which he dealt with things and people.  I’ll tell you a man who would have made a magnificent biography—­Lord Melbourne.  He had a great charm, and a certain whimsical and fantastic humour, which made him do funny little undignified things, like a child.  But every single dictum of Melbourne’s has got something original and graceful about it—­always full of good sense, never pompous, always with a delicious lightness of touch.  The only person who took the trouble to put down Melbourne’s sayings, just as they came out, was Queen Victoria—­but then she was in love with him without knowing it:  and in the end he got stuck into the heaviest and most ponderous of biographies, and is lost to the world.  Stale politics—­there’s nothing to beat them for dulness unutterable!”

“But isn’t it an almost impossible thing,” I said, “to expect a man who is a first-rate writer, with ambitions in authorship, to devote himself to putting down things about some interesting person with the chance of their never being published?  Very few people would have sufficient self-abnegation for that.”

“That’s true enough,” said Father Payne, “and of course it is a risk—­a man must run the risk of sacrificing a good deal of his time and energy to recording unimportant details, perhaps quite uselessly, but with this possibility ahead of him, that he may produce an immortal book—­and I grant you that the infernal vanity and self-glorification of authors is a real difficulty in the way.”