BIOGRAPHY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20768, 10 January 1931, Page 1 (Supplement)

BIOGRAPHY.

MAUROIS ON BYRON.

BY KOTARE

When 'Arry goes forth on Bank Holiday to make a golden day of it, as part of the ritual of the occasion he accumulates a few objets d'arfc by shying at Aunt Sally or the elevated coconut. The practice has ascended in the social scale and has become the common biographical method of the bright young man, of letters 'Tis the sport to knock the alleged great off their pedestals. Mr. Lytlon Strachey seems to have begun the modern vogue. It suits our post-war tastes and mentality. Wo are more interested in the picturesque than in the profound. Spice is more interesting than truth. We like to sec old idols come tumbling down. It satisfies something in us to see a figure the ages have delighted to reverence converted into a tissue of ridiculous affectations and

pomposities. Of course there is often more in this contemptuous revaluation than mere reckless iconoclasm. There is a reverence that blinds, an acceptance of traditional judgments that is nothing more than servility or laziness. Rightly we take nothing for granted; we accept no other period's valuations of men or events or ideas. It would be difficult to mention any great name of the past which has not been attacked in our own day,, and its claims to greatness roundly denied or plausibly explained away. Mr. Lytton Strachey contrived to make all his eminent Victorians more or less ridiculous. I realise that when I try to remember what he said of General Gordon and Florence Nightingale. I read his " Eminent Victorians " several times when it first came out, and was fascinated by the freshness of its approach and by its picturesqueness and dramatic force. But all that remains with me now is a series of vivid pictures in which the central character appears unpleasant or foolish or both. Wrong Emphasis. There must be something radically wrong with a biographical method that leaves such a residue in the final winnowing. It may be my own fault; but it is a hateful thing to have the name of the valiant Gordon bring up first of all memories of a tent in the desert where a great soldier steeps himself in alcohol. And Florence Nightingale should call up worthier images than the grim picture of a relentless, ruthless, demonic personality driving to its goals over the broken bodies of her friends, or the horrible one of a stout, helpless old woman in an invalid's chair, mumbling foolishly in tho last stages of senile decay. The emphasis is all wrong. Anyone could be made to appear a ridiculous figure by such a method. The results may be very entertaining at the time, but Truth, the great mistress of all sincere art, is not served.

But the process is not confined to knocking down idols. It is even rarer sport to take a figure universally condemned and paint it in noble and heroic forms. There is not a scoundrel but has his champions to-day. The villain becomes the hero of the piece, and the devil himself is far from being as blackas he is painted. Nero has at, last found a strenuous defender. lam expecting any day now that some woman biographer will discover that Charles the Second was a model of all the domestic virtues and an example to his subjects in faithfulness and honour. Chesterton misjudges modern capacity when ho states that No nan of tact Would trace and praise his every act. Or argue that he was in fact A strict and sainted bloke. Shelley. M. Andre Maurois has written two very brilliant biographies of English men of letters His " Ariel " is the most vivid impressionist life of Shelley ever penned. It is a series of pictures that make the ethereal romantic genius an extraordinarily human and lovable man. The only trouble is that it makes the Pi/.n so real that there is not enough room left for the poet and philisopher. Shelley may' have been the very man Maurois has depicted, but there was much more in him than the French critic has managed to put on paper. Maurois may have limited his portrait of deliberate purpose, but the fact remains that the biggest things in Shelley do not get adequate expression here. It is the Strachey method in its highest form.

M- Maurois possibly has felt that. In his Byron ho goes deeper. He uses a larger canvas, too. Byron has been depicted as a much misjudged man. He has been painted too as the devil incarnate. For the first time Maurois enables us to see an intelligible Byron. He writes calmly, sympathetically and without, prejudice. It seems almost impossible for an Englishman to do justice to Byron. And Lady Byron, too, comes to life iti his pages. No English writer I have read has ever made an understandable human being of her. Byron's shipwreck of his life Maurois traces to two primary causes. In him were united two of the wildest strains in the British blood. The Byrons had been notorious for mad recklessness for centuries. The blood was bad. Possibly the only worse strain in tho United Kingdom was the special Gordon stock to which Byron's mother belonged.. Generations of violence and evil living and madness lay behind Byron on both lines of his descent. That was bad enough to begin with. Byron. But heredity was further emphasised by environment. Byron was brought up by his mother in the North of Scotland. The sensitive boy was trained in a narrow ultra-Calvanistic atmosphere which impressed upon him the fact that his destiny was already appointed for him before he came into the world. Fate had decided what he should be and do and he had no say in the matter. The clever emotional boy knew what his ancestry had been, and concluded that he was destined to a life of shame on earth and eternal punishment hereafter. And Maurois says that this idea dominated all his life. Ho was doomed. The mark was on his forehead. Conscious, that there was no escape for him, hounded on as he believed himself by fate, he began to take a sombre pride in the fact that he was not, as other men. If ho heard of any form of evil particularly reprobated by public opinion, he knew at once that sooner or later he would be guilty of it. He had many noble and generous instincts; but the foreknowledgo of doom, on a mind unstable, sent him joylessly in pursuit of evil. A tragic figure, richly endowed very human in- his vanities and impulses, living quite normally for the most part, but urged on to spectacular vice from time to time by what he believed to bo relentless fate, shadowed even in his brightest hours by the unchanging consciousness of doom —that is the 'man that looks out from Maurois' pages.