IMAGINARY LIVES
PREFACE
The science of history leaves us uncertain as to individuals, revealing only those points by which individuals have been attached to generalities. History tells us that Napoleon was ill on the day of Waterloo; that we must attribute Newton’s excessive intellectuality to the absolute consistency of his temperament; that Alexander was drunk when he killed Klitos; and that the fistula of Louis XIV was perhaps the cause of certain of his resolutions. Pascal speculates on the length of Cleopatra's nose... the possible consequences had it been a trifle shorter; and on the grain of sand in Cromwell’s urethra. All these facts are valued only when they modify events or alter a series of events. They are causes, established or possible. We must leave them to savants.
Contrary to history, art describes individuals, desires only the unique. It does not classify, it unclassifies. No matter how much they may engage us, our generalizations may be likened to those pursued upon the planet Mars, and three lines drawn to intersect them might form a triangle on all the points of the universe. But consider a leaf with its intricate nerve system, its color variegated by shade and sun; the imprint of a raindrop; the tiny mark left by an insect; the silver trace of a snail; or the first mortal touch of autumn gold. Search all the forests of the earth for another leaf exactly like it. I defy you to find one. There is no science for the teguments of a leaf, for the filaments of a cell structure, the winding of a vein, the passion of a habit, or for the twists and quirks of character. That a man’s nose is broken; one of his eyes higher than the other; an arm shrunken; that he habitually eats chicken at a certain hour or prefers Malvoise to Chateau-Margaux ... there is something unparalleled in the world. Thales might have said as well as Socrates, but he would never have scratched his leg in precisely the same manner before drinking the hemlock draught. Great minds and their ideas are humanity’s common heritage. Actually, great men themselves possess only that which is bizarre about them. To describe a man in all his anomalies a book should be a work of art, like a Japanese print whereon the image of a tiny caterpillar, seen once at one particular hour of a day, is found eternally recorded.
On such individual facts history is silent. In the crude collection of material furnishing our testimony we find few singular or in¬ imitable relics. Misers all, valuing only politics or grammar, the ancient biographers have transmitted no more to us than the discourses of great men or the titles of their works. It was Aristophanes himself who gave us the joy of knowing that he was bald; and if the flat nose of Socrates had not served in literary comparisons, if his custom of walking barefoot had not been part of his system of philosophic scorn, we should have nothing left of him but moral dissertations. The gossip of Suetonius Tranquillus remains little more than spiteful polemic. Plutarch’s genius made an artist of him at times, though while he realized the essence of his art, he was always imagining parallels, as if two men properly described in all their qualities can ever resemble each other. In our search we are driven to consider the Atheneum, Aulu-Gelle, the scholiasts and even Diogenes Lasrce, who thought he had composed a sort of history of philosophy.
In modern times the study of the individual has developed advantageously. Boswell’s book would have been perfect had he not felt obliged to quote Johnson’s correspond Aubrey had the instinct of a true biographer, there can be no doubt about it. What a pity it is that this excellent antiquarian’s style could not rise to the level of his conceptions! His book might have been the eternal masterpiece of its species, for Aubrey never saw the necessity of establishing connections between individual facts and general actions. Others, he knew, would some day mark the celebrity of those great men in whom he interested himself, and he was satisfied. Statesman, poet or clockmaker, each subject finds, under his pen, some unique trait distinguishing that man forever among all men. During his one hundred and ten years of life the painter Hokusai hoped to arrive at the ideal of his art. In that moment, he said, every point and every line traced by his pencil should be a living thing. By “living” he meant unique and individual. Now lines and points are superlatively alike: geometry is founded on that postulate.
Yet Hokusai’s perfection of art required a superlative difference between them. To that end ideal biography should seek infinite differentiation between two philosophies invented around the same metaphysic. That is why Aubrey, concerning himself uniquely with men, never attained perfection, for he never accomplished the miraculous transformation of resemblances and diversities hoped for by Hokusai. But neither did Aubrey attain the age of one hundred and ten. He is estimable, nevertheless, and he himself has summed up the limitations of his own book. “I recall,” he writes in his preface to Anthony Wood, “General Lambert’s words ‘the best of men are but men at best’ and you will find numerous examples of such in this crude, precocious collection. Should these arcana be revealed today or thirty years hence? It might be better if author and subject (like medlars) first die and rot.”
Among Aubrey’s predecessors can be found some of the rudiments of his art. Diogenes Lserce tells us that Aristotle wore on his abdomen a leather bag filled with hot oil, and that a quantity of terra-cotta vases were found in his house after his death. We shall never know what Aristotle did with all that pottery, and the mystery is as agreeable as Boswell’s conjectures regarding the orange peelings which Johnson was accustomed to save and carry in his pockets. For once Diogenes Lserce rises near to the sublimity of inimitable Boswell, but such pleasures are rare. Aubrey, however, offers them in nearly every line. Milton, he tells us, “pronounced the letter R very hard.” Spencer was a “little man with his hair cut short, wearing a little collarette and little cuffs.” Barclay “lived in England during the reign of King Jacobus. He was an old man with a white beard and he wore a plumed hat that scandalized his severe neighbors.” Erasmus “did not care for fish in spite of the fact that he came from a fishing village.” As for Bacon, “none of his servants dared appear before him in any boots but those made of Spanish leather, for his nose was sure to detect the smell of calf skin, which he detested.” Doctor Fuller “concentrated so deeply upon his work that he often ate a two-penny roll without ever noticing it, as he walked out before dinner, wrapped in thought.” Aubrey gives the following account of Sir William Davenant: “I attended his funeral. He had a walnut coffin. Sir John Denham vowed it the finest coffin he had ever seen.” Of Ben Jonson he wrote “I have heard Mr. Lacy, the actor, say he had a habit of wearing a cloak like a coachman’s, with vents under the armpits.” Aubrey’s record of William Prynne declares “his manner of working was thus: he put on a tall pointed cap that kept sliding down over his eyes, serving as an eye-shade, and about every three hours his servants brought him a loaf of bread and a pot of ale to refresh his spirit, and so he worked on, drinking and munching, until evening when he ate a good dinner.” Hobbes, says Aubrey, “grew very bald in his old age. It was his custom to study bareheaded, saying he never took cold, but was very much annoyed by the flies lighting on his bald head.” Of John Harrington’s Oceana Aubrey tells us nothing, though he relates the following story of its author: “In A. D. 1660 he was made a prisoner in the tower under close guard, and was afterwards removed to Portsey Castle. His confinement in these prisons (he was a hot-headed, high-spirited gentleman) brought on delirium or madness. He never became violent, for he talked reasonably enough and was very pleasant company, but was pursued by the fantastic notion that his perspiration turned into flies and bees ad cetera sobrius. He had a portable house put up in Mr. Hart’s garden (facing St. James’s Park), and there he made his experiments. Pushing his house into the full sunlight, he closed all the windows and sat down with a fox brush to massacre all the flies and bees discovered. Since he always made the experiment in warm weather, there were usually a few flies in the folds of the curtains. When the heat drew them out after a quarter of an hour or so, he would exclaim, ‘now can’t you see plainly enough they come from me?’ ”
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| Marcel Schwob |
Here is what Aubrey says of Merton: “His real name was Head. Mr. Bovey knew him well. Born in ..., he was at one time a bookseller and had also traveled with the Gypsies. His goggling eyes gave him the air of a rogue, for he could change them into any form he wished. Bankrupt twice or three times over, he began to sell books toward the last. He earned his living at scribbling, for which he was paid twenty shillings a page, and he wrote several books: The English Rogue, The Art of Wheedling, etc. He was drowned at sea while on his way to Plymouth about 1676, when he was about fifty years old.”
But I must quote his biography of Descartes:
“Meur Renatus des Cartes Nobilis Gallus, Perroni Dominus, summus Mathematicus et Philosophus, natus turonmn, pridie Calendas Apriles 1596. Denatus Holmias, Calendus Februarii, 1650. (I find this inscription on his portrait by C. V. Dalen.) How did he spend his youth, and by what means become so learned ? He has given the world knowledge of these matters in his treatise De la Method. The Society de Jesus prides itself with hav¬ ing had the honor of his education. For a number of years he lived at Egmont near The Hague, and several of his books are dated from there. He was far too wise a man to encumber himself with a wife, but being nevertheless a man with a man’s desires and appetites, he took for a companion a handsome, well-made woman whom he loved, and who bore him several children (two or three, I believe). It would be very surprising had the offspring of such a father not received excellent educations. So eminently learned was he that all the scholars of the day visited him, many asking to see his instruments (in those days the science of mathematics was thought to consist largely in a knowledge of instruments). Then the great savant would pull out a little drawer in his table and show his guests a compass with one arm broken, a twisted scrap of paper serving in place of the missing part.”
Aubrey clearly understood this phase of his work. He was perfectly conscious of what he did. Do not think he mistook the value of Hobbes or Descartes as philosophers. He was simply not interested there. He tells us plainly enough that Descartes himself has explained his ideas and systems to the world. Aubrey does not ignore the fact that Harvey discovered the principle of the blood’s circulation, but he prefers to note down how this great man strolled abroad in his nightshirt to walk off the insomnia, that he was a faulty penman and that the most celebrated doctors in London would not have given sixpence for any of his prescriptions. Aubrey is sure he is startling us when he describes Francis Bacon’s eye as being fine, hazel, and quick like a viper’s. But Aubrey was not the artist that Holbein was. He never knew how to fix an individual forever in our minds by giving us his special traits against a background of resemblances, to the average or the ideal. He put life the eye, the nose, the leg or the pout of his models; he could not animate the face. Old Hokusai saw very well the necessity of drawing generalities so that they should seem to be individual. Aubrey failed to penetrate as deep as that. Were Boswell’s book confined to ten pages it would be the artistic masterpiece so long awaited. Doctor Johnson’s good taste guided him safely through the vulgar and the commonplace. Boswell has slighted the bizarre violence that gave Johnson a quality unique in all the world. One might print a Scientia Johnsoniana with an index Boswell would not have had the esthetic courage to choose from.
As an art, biography is founded upon choice; truth need not be its preoccupation, for out of a chaos of human traits it can create. To create the world, said Leibnitz, God chose the best from the possible. So, like some inferior deity, biography should select unique individuals from the realm of human material available. And it should fail in its art no farther than God fails in His favor and mercy. In both cases instinct must be infallible. Patient men have assembled ideas, records of events and descriptions of faces—all for the benefit of biography. In the midst of these great collections art must choose what it needs to compose a form that will be like no other form. It matters not if this form resemble something formerly created by a superior god, so long as it is unique and a genuine creation.
As a rule biographers have unfortunately considered themselves historians, thus depriving us of many admirable portraits. They have supposed the lives of great men only would interest us. Art is a stranger to such considerations. To the eyes of a painter a portrait of an unknown man, by Cranach, is as valuable as a portrait of the great Erasmus. For the name, Erasmus, cannot make a picture inimitable. Biography should give as much worth to an obscure actor as it gives to the life of Shakespeare. Deep is the instinct compelling us to note with pleasure the shortened sterno-mastoid formation in a bust of Alexander, or the lock of hair in portraits of Napoleon. The Mona Lisa smile of which we know nothing (it is possibly a man’s face), remains forever mysterious and arresting. A grimace drawn by Hokusai leads us to profound meditation. If the art in which Boswell and Aubrey excelled is to be continued, minute records of great men or epochs or events of the past are not especially needed. With equal care must be recounted the unique existences of men—priests, criminals or nobodies.
Marcel Schwob
Imaginary Lives
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