How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [116]
There remain those biographies that are neither definitive nor authorized. Perhaps we may call them ordinary biographies. In such works, we expect the author to be accurate, to know his facts. We want above all to be given the feeling that we are viewing the life of a real person in another time and place. Human beings are curious, and especially curious about other human beings.
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Such books, although not trustworthy in the way definitive biographies are, are often very good reading. The world would be the poorer without Izaak Walton's Lives of his friends, the poets John Donne and George Herbert, for example ( Walton is of course better known for his The Compleat Angler) ; or John Tyndall's account of his friend Michael Faraday in Faraday the Discoverer.
Some biographies are didactic. They have a moral purpose. Not many of this sort are written any more, but they used to be common. ( They are still written for children, of course. ) Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans is such a work. Plutarch told the stories of great men of the Greek and Roman past in order to help his contemporaries to be great also, and to help them avoid the errors into which the great so often fall-or so he felt. The Lives is a marvelous book; but, although many of the accounts are the only ones we have of their subjects, we do not read it so much for its biographical information as for its view of life in general. Its subjects are interesting people, good and bad, but never indifferent.
Plutarch realized this himself. His original intention in writing had been to instruct others, he said, but in the course of the work he discovered that more and more it was he himself who was deriving profit and stimulation from "lodging these men one after the other in his house."
Incidentally, Plutarch's is another historical work that has exercised a profound influence on subsequent history. For example, just as Plutarch shows Alexander the Great modeling his own life on that of Achilles ( whose life he learned about from Homer ), so many later conquerors have tried to model their lives on that of Plutarch's Alexander.
Autobiographies present some different and interesting problems. First of all, it is questionable whether anyone has ever written a true autobiography. If it is difficult to know the life of anyone else, it is even more difficult to know one's own.
And, of course, all autobiographies have to be written about lives that are not yet complete.
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The temptation to tell either less or more than the truth ( the latter may be more common ) , when there is no one to contradict you, is almost irresistible. Everybody has some secrets he cannot bear to divulge; everybody also has some illusions about himself, which it is almost impdssible for him to regard as illusions. However, although it is not possible to write a wholly true autobiography, neither is it possible to write one that contains no truth at all. Just as no man can be a perfect liar, so every autobiography tells us something about its author, if only that there are things that he wants to conceal.
It is customary to say that the Confessions of Rousseau, or some other book written about the same time ( about the middle of the eighteenth century ), is the first real autobiography. This is to overlook Augustine's Confessions, for example, and Montaigne' s Essays; but the