They are awfully flat and flabby--they have
all been rolled about in some one's mind, till they are as smooth as
pebbles--some bits of the crudest rudeness, not worked up to--some
knock-down schoolboy retorts which most civilised men would have had the
decency to repress--and then we get back to the real Boswell again, and how
fresh and lively it is!"
"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.
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