He was silent for a minute or two, and then he said:  “Now, I’ll tell you another difficulty, that at present people only want biographies of men of affairs, of big performers, men who have done things—­I don’t want that.  I want biographies of people who wielded a charm of personality, even if they didn’t do things—­people, I mean, who deserve to live and to be loved.—­Those are the really puzzling figures a generation later, the men who lived in an atmosphere of admiring and delighted friendship, radiating a sort of enchanting influence, having the most extravagant things said and believed about them by their friends, and yet never doing anything in particular.  People, I mean, like Arthur Hallam, whose letters and remains are fearfully pompous and tiresome—­and who yet had In Memoriam written about him, and who was described by Gladstone as the most perfect human being, physically, intellectually and morally, he had ever seen.  Then there is Browning’s Domett—­the prototype of Waring—­and Keats’s friend James Rice, and Stevenson’s friend Ferrier—­that’s a matchless little biographical fragment, Stevenson’s letter about Ferrier—­those are the sort of figures I mean, the men who charmed and delighted everyone, were brave and humorous, gave a pretty turn to everything they said—­those are the roses by the wayside!  They had ill-health some of them, they hadn’t the requisite toughness for work, they even took to drink, or went to the bad.  But they are the people of quality and tone, about whom one wants to know much more than about sun-burnt and positive Generals—­the strong silent sort—­or overworked politicians bent on conciliating the riff-raff.  I don’t want to know about men simply because they did honest work, and still less about men who never dared to say what they thought and felt.  You can’t make a striking picture out of a sense of responsibility!  I’m not underrating good work—­it’s fine in every way, but it can’t always be written about.  There are exceptions, of course.  Nelson and Wellington would have been splendid subjects, if anyone had really Boswellised them.  But Nelson had a theatrical touch about him, and became almost too romantic a hero; while the Duke had a fund of admirable humour and almost grotesque directness of expression,—­and he has never been half done justice to, though you can see from Lord Mahon’s little book of Table Talk and Benjamin Haydon’s Diary, and the letters to Miss J., what a rich affair it all might have been, if only there had been a perfectly bold, candid, and truthful biographer.”

“But the charming people of whom you spoke,” I said—­“isn’t the whole thing often too evanescent to be recorded?”