Most of you approach biography in that way.  You look through the book, and you see it isn’t divided up into dialogue, as a story is, and there are no illustrations, only pictures of crabbed-looking people, and so you decide that you are not going to like it, and consequently you don’t like it, no matter how likeable it is.

It isn’t wholly your fault that you have acquired this feeling.  Strangely enough, most biographies give no such impression of reality as good fiction does.  John Ridd, for instance, is more alive for most of us than Thomas Jefferson—­the one is a flesh-and-blood personality, while the other is merely a name.  This is because the average biographer apparently does not comprehend that his first duty is to make his subject seem alive, or lacks the art to do it; and so produces merely a lay-figure, draped with the clothing of the period.  And usually he misses the point and fails miserably because he concerns himself with the mere doing of deeds, and not with that greatest of all things, the development of character.

All great biographies are written with insight and imagination, as well as with truth; that is, the biographer tries, in the first place, to find out not only what his subject did, but what he thought; he tries to realize him thoroughly, and then, reconstructing the scenes through which he moved, interprets him for us.  He endeavors to give us the rounded impression of a human being—­of a man who really walked and talked and loved and hated—­so that we may feel that we knew him.  But most biographies are seemingly written about statues on pedestals, and not good statues at that.

I am hoping to see the rise, some day, of a new school of biography, which will not hesitate to discard the inessential, which will disdain to glorify its subject, whose first duty it will be to strip away the falsehoods of tradition and to show us the real man, not hiding his imperfections and yet giving them no more prominence than they really bore in his life; which will realize that to the man nothing was of importance except the growth of his spirit, and that to us nothing else concerning him is of any moment; which will show him to us illumined, as it were, from within, and which will count any other sort of life-history as vain and worthless.  What we need is biography by X-ray, and not by tallow candle.

Until that time comes, dear reader, you yourself must supply the X-ray of insight.  If you can learn to do that, you will find history and biography the most interesting of studies.  Biography is, of course, the basis of all history, since history is merely the record of man’s failures and successes; and, read thus, it is a wonderful and inspiring thing, for the successes so overtop the failures, the good so out-weighs the bad.  By the touchstone of imagination, even badly written biography may be colored and vitalized.  Try it—­try to see the man you are reading about as an actual human being; make him come out of