The biographies of great people
fall more or less readily into the histories of these two selves. The
official biographer reproduces the public life, the revealing memoir
the other. The Charnwood Lincoln, for example, is a noble portrait,
not of an actual human being, but of an epic figure, replete with
significance, who moves on much the same level of reality as Aeneas or
St. George. Oliver's Hamilton is a majestic abstraction, the sculpture
of an idea, "an essay" as Mr. Oliver himself calls it, "on American
union." It is a formal monument to the state-craft of federalism,
hardly the biography of a person. Sometimes people create their own
facade when they think they are revealing the interior scene. The
Repington diaries and Margot Asquith's are a species of
self-portraiture in which the intimate detail is most revealing as an
index of how the authors like to think about themselves.
But the most interesting kind of portraiture is that which arises
spontaneously in people's minds. When Victoria came to the throne,
says Mr. Strachey, [Footnote: Lytton Strachey, _Queen Victoria_,
p. 72.] "among the outside public there was a great wave of
enthusiasm. Sentiment and romance were coming into fashion; and the
spectacle of the little girl-queen, innocent, modest, with fair hair
and pink cheeks, driving through her capital, filled the hearts of the
beholders with raptures of affectionate loyalty.
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