The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [112]
So we hear booming out from Boswell’s page the voice of Samuel Johnson: “No, sir; stark insensibility,” we hear him say. Once we have heard those words we are aware that there is an incalculable presence among us … All the draperies and decencies of biography fall to the ground. We can no longer maintain that life consists in actions only or in works. It consists in personality.47
From this height, Woolf suggests, biography fell—becoming more prolix, more prosy, more lengthy, and more tedious:
[T]he Victorian biography was a parti-coloured, hybrid, monstrous birth. For though truth of fact was observed as scrupulously as Boswell observed it, the personality which Boswell’s genius set free was hampered and distorted … the Victorian biographer was dominated by the idea of goodness. Noble, upright, chaste, severe: it is thus that the Victorian worthies are presented to us.48
And not only the Victorian worthies. Some Victorian biographers—Woolf singles out Sir Sidney Lee—contrived to write multivolume biographies, “worthy of all our respect,” books that are monumental “piles … of hard facts,” in effect noble and upright but irretrievably boring to read: “we can only explain the fact that Sir Sidney’s life of Shakespeare is dull, and that his life of Edward the Seventh is unreadable, by supposing that both are stuffed with truth, although he failed to choose those truths which transmit personality.”49
Woolf is here teasing Sidney Lee with a phrase of his own design—“The aim of biography is the truthful transmission of personality”—with which she begins her own essay, only to suggest that the two elements, truth and personality, are extremely difficult to “weld into one seamless whole,” which is why “biographers for the most part have failed” to do so.50 Lee’s life of Shakespeare is 776 pages long; his biography of Edward VII ran to two volumes. This scrupulous heft, detail piled on detail in the service of “truth,” was increasingly typical, indeed, increasingly expected. “The conscientious biographer may not tell a fine tale with a flourish but must toil through endless labyrinths and embarrass himself with countless documents.”51 The method, however painstaking, strikes her as exhibiting “prodigious waste” and “artistic wrongheadedness.” One of the virtues of the “new biography,” as Woolf goes on to describe it, is that it is, in contrast, relatively brief, pithy, and lively.
We might pause for a moment to reflect upon Woolf’s choice of Sidney Lee as the epitome of the achievements and problems of Victorian biography. Lee, born Solomon Lazarus Lee, was a close friend and associate of Woolf’s father and succeeded him in 1891 as the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Leslie Stephen was not only an editor but a prolific biographer, author of books on Pope, Swift, Hobbes, Samuel Johnson, and George Eliot. He died in 1904; Lee lived until 1926; Woolf’s essay was written in 1927. In selecting Sidney Lee as the antitype of the new biography, Woolf both sidesteps and sideswipes her father’s work and his demands, upon which she reflected in her diary a year later, on his birthday (November 28): “His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books;—inconceivable.”
In writing about the “new biography” Woolf thus resolutely turns a page between the past and the present, the parental generation and her own. “With the twentieth century,” she says,
a change came over biography, as it came over fiction and poetry. The first and most visible sign of it was in the difference in size. In the first twenty years of the new century biographies must have lost half their weight. Mr. Strachey compressed four stout Victorians into one slim volume [Eminent Victorians]; Mr. Maurois boiled the usual two volumes of a Shelley life into one little book the size of a novel. But the diminution in size was only the outward token of an inward change. The point of view had completely altered. If we open one of the new school of biographies its bareness, its emptiness makes us at once aware