In every biography there is this problem. Your hero is at "that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least," as Stevenson called life, and the manner in which the hero perceives the "imperious desires and staggering consequences" will determine the flavor of his life. To turn to Stevenson himself we find a white-hot flame of romance cased in a feeble wraith of a body, the heart of the man daring all things, romping through life a deathless youth before the problem of adjustment between body and spirit. Or take the compounding of that tremendous figure, George Washington--adamant integrity, the zeal which, if unchecked, would often have brought the house tumbling about his ears, the endless capacity for indignation, and with these the patience that left men well-nigh dazed and the self-control that made him god-like. Set him in the midst of the hurly-burly of a young nation as doubtful of itself as youth, as eager, as impetuous, as contradictory, with the forces of the Old World pitted against it and with many traitors in its fold. Then conceive the problem of forming wise conjunction between vision and accomplishment, between desire and restraint, and the life of the man is at once unified, centered, illuminated, and made significant.
The same result follows searching to the heart of any hero, high or low, and failure thus to reach the heart causes the pallid uninteresting heaping of details that mean nothing to the reader. No architect can glorify the horizon with the silhouette of a cathedral, nor can he even give a meaning to his accumulation of stone and mosaic and mortar, if he heaps here a pile and there a pile, rears here a chapel, somewhere else as fancy directs lays out an aisle, with no central problem of relationship. Nor can you dignify your hero's nature with a mere basket collection of the flying chips of life--a deed here, a word there, a desire at another time. First, then, discover the problem that your hero faced in the relation of his character to itself and to its times.
To discover the problem, really to understand it, requires as your chief tool imaginative sympathy. Without this your writing will leave your hero as flat and shiny as any conscientiously laundered piece of linen. You are to picture him in relief, in the round, to make him live again, step down from his pedestal, and put his shoulder alongside ours and speak to us. We read in a history that faces the necessity of condensation how William the Conqueror "consolidated his domains"--and it means nothing at all to us of stimulating individual value. We do not think of the recalcitrant underlings whose necks he had to force to bow, of the weary eyes that gladly closed at the end of a terrible day's work, of the frequent desire, which at times must be suppressed, perhaps at times gratified, to run a sword through an opposing subject. We forget, in other words, that William was a man, a personality, a bundle of nervous reactions and desires. But the writing fails, as biography, unless we do remember these things. It is in the discovery and understanding of these details and in combining them into a personality that our sympathy is required. No one should set pen to paper in the service of biography who has not a lively personal interest in his hero, who has not an open, loving feeling for him--saint or villain whichever he may be--and desires to make his reader, in turn, _feel_ the hero's personality. The ideal biographer is he who can peep out through the eyes of his hero at the sights which he saw, can feel the surge of ambition, of love, of hate, the quickening of the heart at success, and the cold pallor of defeat. We have seen a grown person watch with cold eyes a child who wrestles with a problem of digging a ditch or building a dam or making a harness for the dog, gradually lose the coldness of indifference, forget the gulf of years, kindle to the problem, and finally with delight catch up spade or leather and give assistance. Until you feel a similar thrill of sharing experience with your hero, do not write about him.