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A man strikes it with all his might; his mark may be 40,000 pounds, a peerage, and Westminster Abbey, a name in literature or art; but in every case his mark is nicely determined by the force or the art with which the buffer is struck. Into the world a man brings his personality, and his biography is simply a catalogue of its results.
Some such is available in history and biography; some in essays. As I write there come to my mind several books that have impressed me: Professor Palmer's "Life of Alice Freeman Palmer"; Leonard Huxley's "Life and Letters of T.H. Huxley," which gives many intimate glimpses of the ideal home life which the great biologist centered around Mrs.
And here is the main formal difference between life as it actually happens and life as it is artistically represented in history, biography, and fiction. In every art there are two steps; first, the selection of essentials, and secondly, the arrangement of these essentials according to a pattern.
She held her own pretty head the higher. For she soon discarded the ballet girl's biography. By the time she was fourteen, had made another visit to Nahant, and had once been asked to a Christmas party at the Boston house, she saw that aristocratic life could offer better things.
"As long as Atalantis shall be read," some readers were sure to find little to their taste in the curious information contained in the first biography of Campbell, but Mrs. Haywood was not reluctant to gratify an appetite for scandal when she could profitably cater to it.
People who ought to be interested in fiction are carried away by biography, and the chances are that some of them will never come back. When they once get a taste for highly spiced intellectual victuals, you can't get them to relish the breakfast food you set before them. It seems to them insipid. I know what you will say about Garibaldi. He was not your kind.
Borrow was often asked by visitors to Oulton if it was his intention to leave behind him the necessary material for the compilation of a biography of his strange career. This, however, he could never be persuaded to do. He maintained that “Lavengro,” “The Romany Rye,” and “The Bible in Spain,” contained all of his life that it was necessary for posterity to know.
But these teachers went too far; for, in 1771, nearly one hundred and fifty years after his death, the monk Vaerini gathered together, in a pretended biography, all the scurrilities which could be imagined, and endeavored to bury the memory of the great patriot beneath them. This was too much.
In history, in biography, in science, in the essay, in the novel and story, there are coming forth a hundred expressions of the hundred aspects of American life; and they are also sung by the poets in notes as varied as the migrating birds.
But he says the biography of every woman begins with the first kiss that counts, and ends when her last child is laid in her arms." "He's talking from his book." "He says unloved women have no biographies they have histories." Anthony laughed again. "Surely you don't claim to be unloved!" "Well, I suppose not." "Then why haven't you a biography? Haven't you ever had a kiss that counted?"
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