Many a historical crisis hinged on some apparently slight biographical fact. At the siege of Syracuse, there was a moment when the Athenians, whose position had become untenable, could have retreated: had they done so, the outcome of the Peloponnesian War might have been reversed. Why did they not retreat? Because on the fatal night an eclipse occurred, and Nicias, their general, refused to stir. The next night was too late. The destruction of the Athenian power turned, therefore, on the superstition of one general; for there were other generals whom the eclipse did not overawe. Thus does the personality of men tinge events. We must know not merely a man's politics or religion, his generalship or courage or his whims and vices, but his physiology as well. Frederick II put back to land and abandoned his crusade because he could not endure seasickness. The French lost the fruits of Borodino because, on the evening of the battle, Napoleon had a physical collapse which prevented him from giving orders to pursue the Russians. But for epilepsy in youth, which turned him from a worldly life to the priesthood, Giovanni Mastai Ferretti might never have been crowned Pius IX. Lincoln's humor, so sadly misunderstood during the Civil War, is now seen to have been an essential element in his character, enabling him to shoulder for four years the most herculean burden laid on a modern statesman. I cite illustrious examples, but to the biographer no trifling personal trait is negligible.

The importance of the body as the basis of personality is too evident to require comment. The cause of many acts which have altered history is to be sought in the physiological condition of this or that man. Unfortunately, our records are very meagre, and furthermore medical science has not yet reached that state of precision where it can assert positively that a fatal chain of cause and effect connected given pathological symptoms and established deeds. Frederick the Second's seasickness, which put an end to a crusade, is a capital example of the temporary control of the will by the body. In innumerable lives we perceive how disease checks or distorts or clouds nature. We see plainly enough that opium ruined the magnificent genius of Coleridge, debasing a poet on whom nature had lavished almost all her gifts into a spinner of "Church of England cobwebs," and a metaphysician who spent his energy winding and unwinding endless rolls of German philosophy-as a juggler, after showing you that his

hat is empty, conjures clouds of tinsel out of it, causes them to disappear, and then shows you the empty hat again: there was nothing before, there is nothing now. Not less real, although often more subtle, has been the action of disease. The intellect, as in the case of Leopardi or Pascal, may do its work unimpaired in spite of a broken-down body, yet we cannot help feeling that his frightful physical condition determined Leopardi's pessimism, however staunchly he denied it. The same disease, of course, affects different persons differently, because deeper than the corporal wrap is the temperament. Parkman was a victim of nervous exhaustion which has certainly not been exceeded in violence or duration among literary men; but it could not hinder him from producing those twelve volumes of history in which you will seek in vain for a sign of weakness. And there are maladies-consumption, for instance-which seem actually to favor creative writing, as if, in compensation for enfeebling the body, they clarified or etherealized the mind. Witness the lives of Keats and Lanier, of Symonds and Stevenson.

The work in this field of the physiologists, led by Lombroso, has been salutary, although we may well question the rigidity of their conclusions. Recently, such investigations as Dr. George M. Gould has described in his "Biographical Clinics," on the origin of the ill health of De Quincey, Carlyle, Darwin, Huxley, Browning and others point the direction in which medical specialists will turn. We must not, however, concede too much to pathological conditions; that is the error of those who accept too strictly Professor Lombroso's conclusions. Any process which tends to regard genius and insanity as synonymous has itself an insane taint. The morbid psychologists refer all their comparison to the Normal Man; but, when we look closely, we find that the Normal Man is an imaginary being to whom all actual men are exceptions. Once on his guard against confiding too implicitly in the infallibility of scientific apparatus, a perfect biographer should be keen to investigate this side of his hero's life, and to compute the influence which constitutional or chronic ills may have had upon it. By singular good fortune, Boswell had in Johnson a subject whose morbid strata were so apparent that, although Boswell does not write from the modern pathologist's standpoint, yet he discloses to any intelligent reader the source of many of Johnson's idiosyncrasies.

From psychology, too, the biographer will get much aid: yet it is by no means evident whether the real advance in our knowledge of the human equipment will not come through pathology rather than through psychology. Are we not a little imposed upon by new names for old things when we listen to many of the so-called discoveries of the psychologist? We have learned to talk glibly of "reactions," as if they explained anything. We know how long it takes for a pin-prick to be felt, a noise to be heard, a flavor to be tasted; we have photographs of the face in wrath, joy, pain, grief: but have we got any nearer the inner cause? Are these more than studies of the outside, registrations of the bodily vehicles of sensation? To be able to state in what fraction of a second the electric current flashes along the telegraph-wire from Boston to New York, or how many volts it has, tells absolutely nothing about the message it carries, or of the person who wrote the message. If you could put Shakespeare and Dante through the tests of the algometer, would you understand their genius a whit better? Psychology cannot yet penetrate to the causes of personality; but such aid as it can give, the biographer will gladly avail himself of. He will certainly be helped by it to scrutinize his subject more closely, to look in outof-the-way places for indications of character, and perchance to confirm what pathology has suggested; and he will remember that this science, which is still in its infancy, may have a splendid future. Let him also bear in mind that saying of our master psychologist to-day: "Our knowledge is as a drop, our ignorance is as the ocean."

The truth-loving biographer will welcome the instruments which modern science puts in his hands, but he will beware of trusting them too far. Next to a religious revival, nothing is more likely to promise what it cannot fulfil than a scientific theory just broached. You think you have in it a key to the universe; you discover at last that it simply fits a new-fangled lock to your old front door. If you start with the purpose of proving a doctrine, you will surely fail. Taine, in so many respects the most important French mind of his time, more than once came to grief when he tried to apply his theory of the "moment" and the environment" to special cases. Trusting to his formulas, he insisted that Alfred Tennyson must have grown up amid luxurious surroundings, and given himself over to a voluptuous life. The

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truth was, of course, that Tennyson was the son of a poor clergyman, that until forty years old he lived most frugally on a few hundred dollars a year, writing his poems in the blank leaves of a butcher's book. Yet Taine was so sure that poetry so gorgeous could not have sprung from such an environment, that he refused to believe the truth. Let the biographer, therefore, free himself from every theory of life and method: the only prepossession allowed him is admiration for his hero, since only by that can he possibly come to an understanding of his hero. In the long run, enthusiasm, though it result in exaggeration, serves better than disparagement to reveal the real stature of a man. Time will correct the enthusiast's magnification; but the belittler's underestimate merely measures himself. When a critic writes, "Emerson is not always as shallow as he seems," we suspect that Emerson's shallows will be deep enough for his critic to drown in.

Let us examine more closely the chief objection brought against the biographic treatment of history, that it causes us to see human development out of focus. In studying the Napoleonic era, for example, the complaint is made that it transfers our attention from a myriad details of European society, law, politics, war and education, to the opinions and deeds of Napoleon; so that presently we begin to imagine that these colossal facts have only secondary importance compared with what he willed. The evolution of a nation, these plaintiffs might say, may be compared to the growth of a forest, whose millions of trees belong to the same species and have a common stock of soil and climate; how inexact to regard the one giant pine which, thanks to some slight favoring inequality of condition, overtops the others, as if it were of a different higher species. Under similar conditions, any one of its fellows might have grown as tall. Just as the scientific study of the individual, if pushed too far, results in the creation of a fictitious Normal Man, so the doctrinaires who "account for " great men on the theory that they are as wholly the product of their time as trees are of soil and climate, are forced to create a more or less imaginary "time" to produce them. They pick out certain elements of Dante's time, let us say, and frame them into a machine which could not help making Dante; and then they triumphantly assure us that they have "accounted for Dante." But surely this machine, so vast and intricate, composed of all the actual hopes and deeds of that age, and of all the traditions which VOL. CLXXX.-NO. 579.

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it kept alive from the past, ought to have produced nothing but Dantes, a whole population of Dantes, instead of a single specimen: in fact, however, it produced a Boniface VIII, a Cavalcanti and innumerable other strongly individualized persons unlike him and mutually unlike. This is as if, after we had been told that a century-plant puts forth only one flower before it dies, we should find it bearing roses, violets, goldenrod, deadly nightshade, and scores of other varieties, season by season. The Normal Time, be it that of Cæsar or Charlemagne, of Hildebrand, Dante or Luther, of Washington or Bismarck, is a fiction which might be respected if it did not cause so much misunderstanding. Every sophomore is provided with stock explanations which he firmly believes explain, and, what is worse, his teachers believe it too. We all have our store of cant phrases" ages of faith," or "of doubt," "the age that built cathedrals," "the scientific age”— with which we instinctively mask our ignorance: as if everybody in the twelfth century built cathedrals, or everybody in 1850 was a doubter! It has become the fashion to select some trait and write a history round it. Versatility was a characteristic of the Elizabethan age; the American emigrants came out of that age; therefore Professor Wendell twists American literature into such shape that it seems to be the continuous revelation of Elizabethan traits. But he labors in vain: "The Day of Doom," Cotton Mather, Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, Joel Barlow, and so on down to Bryant, Irving, Cooper and their successors, were not in the least Elizabethan. One might more plausibly trace the decadence of English statesmanship during the past half-century to the vacuous fashion of wearing a monocle, which, of course, precludes seeing clear or straight; or the decadence of the French to their high-heeled boots, which render a solid footing imposgible.

The practice of assuming the conditions that you need to "explain" a celebrated man has gone so far that those who have it do not see its absurdity. It makes writing easy; it gives a certain pleasant air of superiority to a critic or historian; it encourages him to think that he has indeed been permitted to peep behind the veil, and see the causes of things. How confidently Mr. Mabie, for example, discourses in his recent essay on Poe:

"Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Bryant, Irving, and, in certain aspects of his genius, Hawthorne, might have been predicted; reading