When the dominant determination of man seems to be to speed up life so that we can do, or have done for us, in a day what formerly took a month, it seems paradoxical that biography should continue to be what Mr. Lytton Strachey says it is: “Two fat volumes with which it is our custom to commemorate the day--who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slip-shod style, their love of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design?” Biographies have fallen so far behind the bandwagon of progress that their makers can not even hear the music. We should like to have our boys know about Willard Straight, but it is too much to expect that they should read a ponderous volume of six hundred pages to find out about the making of a young American, even though he was a credit to his country. It is not fair to the boy, and it is unjust to Miguel Cervantes. And much as one might like to travel through Asia and Africa with A. Savage Landor, his two fat volumes make one’s eyes turn lovingly to the thin, caressable _Religio Medici_ or to the latest novel of Sheila Kaye-Smith. The great biographies, are they not very long? They are, and that is the pity of it. No one reads them now save a few bookworms and those who became acquainted with them before tabloid nutriment was discovered. Biography must be reformed, first in length, and then in substance. What most of those now rolling off the presses need is form and brevity. The man whose picture can not be painted with a hundred thousand words does not exist. II AUTOBIOGRAPHY “Human life is not to be estimated by what men perform, but by what they are.” J. A. SYMONDS. It is generally accepted that the relation which exists between autobiography and biography is so close that so far as purpose and quality of form and subject are concerned, the words are interchangeable; that is to say, the average person thinks the unique difference between the two is that one is written in the first person, the other in the third. No greater mistake could be made. One is first hand information, the other second, or even third. As Trudeau puts it: to recount the actions of another is not biography, it is zoology. Both have points in common, as all works of art must be founded on art and beauty, but the qualities that make biography great are not those that autobiography needs to achieve perfection.