To write the life of a man
was formerly understood to mean the cataloguing and placing of
circumstances, of those things which stood about the life and were more
or less related to it, but were not the life itself. But Biography from
day to day holds dates cheaper and facts dearer. A man's life, so far as
its outward events are concerned, may be made for him, as his clothes are
by the tailor, of this cut or that, of finer or coarser material; but the
gait and gesture show through, and give to trappings, in themselves
characterless, an individuality that belongs to the man himself. It is
those essential facts which underlie the life and make the individual man
that are of importance, and it is the cropping out of these upon the
surface that gives us indications by which to judge of the true nature
hidden below. Every man has his block given him, and the figure he cuts
will depend very much upon the shape of that,--upon the knots and twists
which existed in it from the beginning. We were designed in the cradle,
perhaps earlier, and it is in finding out this design, and shaping
ourselves to it, that our years are spent wisely. It is the vain endeavor
to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many
broken purposes and lives left in the rough.
Keats hardly lived long enough to develop a well-outlined character, for
that results commonly from the resistance made by temperament to the many
influences by which the world, as it may happen then to be, endeavors to
mould every one in its own image.
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