Excerpt from Gravenhurst, or Thoughts on Good and Evil: Knowing and Feeling, a Contribution to Psychology

IT is quite in vain that critics and readers both con stantly repeat that the biography of a man of letters is almost always unentertaining, and that we could hardly expect it to be otherwise. Whatever it is we expect, or have any just reason for expecting, there is an incurable curiosity to know something of the man wherever the writer has succeeded in interesting us. The case stands thus: we have a living human being revealing himself to us by his thoughts, and by nothing else. Something to fill up the blank we inevitably crave. We have here an object of esteem, perhaps of some degree of veneration, and yet our hero remains obstinately invisible; even to the mind's eye utterly obscure. We desire that he take human form, and be seen moving amongst the realities of life; we desire that he stand out before us somewhat distinctly in the imagination.

Other great men, the man of action, the great captain, the great statesman, write their lives in their deeds the very career which ennobles or distinguishes them is also their biography. We see them in their actions. Their lives, too, are written in the history of their country, and they hardly need a separate memo rial. With the man of letters it is otherwise. He haswritten a book, and placed it there on the desk before us. The hand that placed it there is unseen. Unless some friend will tell us, we can know nothing of the destiny of this man. He comes before us as the thinker only: he had these thoughts, but where 7 under what circumstances? He also lived, enjoyed, or suffered. It may be a commonplace story, but in this instance we must have the commonplace.

These are words of your own, my beloved; and I appeal to their sanction as I prepare to write out my glimpses of your early life, my memories of the later years during which it was intertwined with mine. I am not writing for the public - a task you held un suited to a wife, requiring a more impartial judgment than her love and sorrow could exercise. I only try to write for the inner circle of friends who desire to know how you came to be what you were, and to hold the Opinions you held. I cannot, indeed, tell them much, yet there is no other who can tell them so much. For you used to say that you had let me look you through and through; and whenever you adverted, ever so lightly, to your past, I gathered up your words and stored them in my heart.

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