Book Description

Excerpt from American Portraits, 1875-1900 To the complications which peculiarly affect work on contemporaries must be joined an increasing sense of the difficulty of accomplishing the portrayal of souls at all. More than ever I feel that such portrayal, at least as I can perform it, has no final value. Souls tremble and shift and fade under the touch. They elude and evade and mock you, fool you with false lights and perplex you with impenetrable shadows, till you are almost ready to give up in despair any effort to interpret them. But you cannot give it up; for there is no artistic effort more fascinating and no study so completely inexhaustible. If the substance on which we have to found spiritual interpretation could be relied on, we might have more confidence in the superstructure. But the further we go, the more our confidence is shaken. Take one special form of material, the report of words and conversations. All historians and biographers use such report, are tempted to use it much more than they do. Yet how abominably uncertain it is and must be. Who of uscan remember for an hour the exact words he himself used, even important words, significant words? Much more, who can remember such words of any one else? Yet diarists and biographers will go home and set down at the end of a long evening, or perhaps a day or two later, elaborate phrases which the alleged speaker may have used, and much more likely may not. And this, when the turn of a sentence may alter the light on a man's soul! Of such materials is biography made. I should not wish any one to have more confidence in mine, at least, than I have myself. I desire to acknowledge generally the courtesy and helpfulness of many correspondents who have offered useful suggestions and corrected errors. And for the Opportunity of profiting by these, I must chie y thank the editor of the Atlantic Monthly whose steady and cordial support and sympathy enable me to prosecute my work with an enthusiasm which I could hardly draw from any other source. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."