It seems to be difficult for the contemporary biographer to strike the right balance between hagiography and willful disparagement. In our day, biographies are dashed off with malice aforethought (the straightforward malice of the Albert Goldman kind or the more devious, hand-wringing, pietistical species of dirt-digging of an Andrew Motion); and it has, by corollary, become something of a national pastime on the part of the dull-witted and gullible reader to affect horror and indignation when human beings are discovered to be no more than poor, tasteless confections of muddleheadedness and self-delusion. More’s the wonder then that they manage to achieve as much as they do.
The poet Alfred Lord Tennyson’s first biographer, his son Hallam, erred generously on the side of hagiography, as anyone who has had the stamina to read the thousand-odd pages of treacly and unctuous prose/praise that constitute Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son (1897) will surely agree. Here is Hallam’s version of that great Victorian death-bed scene:
The tendency to fatal syncope may be said to have really commenced about 10 A.M. on Wednesday, and on Thursday, 6 October [1892], at 1:35 A.M., the great poet breathed his last. Nothing could have been more striking than the scene during the last few hours. On the bed a figure of breathing marble, flooded and bathed in the light of the full moon streaming through the oriel window; his hand clasping the Shakespeare which he asked for but recently,
