But this condition has been wanting in some of the
best writers of biographies extant. (9) In the case of Lord
Campbell, his personal intimacy with Lords Lyndhurst and Brougham
seems to have been a positive disadvantage, leading him to dwarf
the excellences and to magnify the blots in their characters.
Again, Johnson says: "If a man profess to write a life, he must
write it really as it was. A man's peculiarities, and even his
vices, should be mentioned, because they mark his character." But
there is always this difficulty,--that while minute details of
conduct, favourable or otherwise, can best be given from personal
knowledge, they cannot always be published, out of regard for the
living; and when the time arrives when they may at length be told,
they are then no longer remembered. Johnson himself expressed
this reluctance to tell all he knew of those poets who had been
his contemporaries, saying that he felt as if "walking upon ashes
under which the fire was not extinguished."
For this reason, amongst others, we rarely obtain an unvarnished
picture of character from the near relatives of distinguished men;
and, interesting though all autobiography is, still less can we
expect it from the men themselves. In writing his own memoirs, a
man will not tell all that he knows about himself. Augustine was
a rare exception, but few there are who will, as he did in his
'Confessions,' lay bare their innate viciousness, deceitfulness,
and selfishness.
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