It
may not be a very difficult thing, perhaps, to write the life of a
politician or a general, or even of a statesman or a great soldier.
At any rate, the history of such a one is an easy matter, compared
with that of a mere man of thought, of a man of genius. In the former
case, we have the marked events, which are, as it were, the
stepping-stones of biography,--events belonging to the narrative of the
time,--and the individual receives a reflected light from many men
and things. Dates and facts make the task of statement or commentary
more easy to the writer, and his work more interesting to the general
reader. But the case of the mere thinker, the man of inaction, whose
sphere of achievement is for the most part a little room, and who
produces his effects in a great measure in silence or solitude, is a
very different one. The names of his publications, the dates of them,
the number of them, the publisher's price for them, the critic's
opinion of them, are meagre facts for the biographer; and if the man
of genius be a man of quiet, sequestered life, the record of it will
be only the more uninteresting to the reader. It is only when
something painful has been suffered, something eccentric done and
misunderstood and denounced or derided, that the biography rouses the
languid interest of the public.
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