mendous public responds to its lure. Biography is no longer the
possession of the hackwriter and the journeyman of letters: it has
become a serious and dignified realm of literary art.

Very little has been done, however, to clarify the principles of
biographical art or to reveal its function in reflecting and deepen-
ing our understanding of our human heritage. The few volumes
that have been published, some of them excellent in their own
realm, are mainly historical surveys of various periods in English
or American biography or else studies of formal biography ex-
cluding all the variety of other forms. No critical work in
biography has taken all this wealth for its province; tried to re-
veal the intensity and vividness with which biography can light
present and past, and how it does so. These I have attempted in
the present volume.

With such a range, encyclopaedic inclusiveness would be self-
defeating. Bold emphasis and omission must be our principles,
not reduction to scale. And so, although we range far afield,
drawing from all the forms of biographical writing, in each period
we focus on only a selected few. It was tempting to consider
including the Confessions of St Augustine, the Vita Nuova of
Dante, Cellini, Casanova, and Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin,
Goethe Dichtung und Warheit, Thoreau, Emerson, and Haw-
thorne as revealed in their respective notebooks, Amiel, Gide, and
many another. But ultimately I decided to confine myself to
English biography, although in a few places I have violated my
own rule. It would be almost heresy, it seemed, to discuss letter-
writing without even mentioning Madame de Sévigné; and in
modern times I could find no satisfactory English rendering of
tendencies represented in The Education of Henry Adams, some
of the works of Van Wyck Brooks and André Maurois, and
The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens.

Even so, there were many inclusions in my original plan that
had in the end to be discarded. Hervey Memoirs of the Reign
of George II almost persuaded me to a chapter on court memoirs
that would have included the Duc de Saint-Simon, Horace Walpole,
Fanny Burney Diaries and Letters, and the entire body of the
Greville Diaries. It would have been fascinating to compare
Newman Apologia with Bunyan Grace Abounding (which I
have included) and Pascal Pensées (which I have not). And

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