Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/24

 Knight who had written over 500 articles on dramatists or actors, and Sir Alexander Arbuthnot who wrote most of the articles on Anglo-Indian officials. Specialists on earlier periods were frequently reluctant to undertake lives of nineteenth-century personages, and two who had each written about a volume for the original Dictionary contributed only one article apiece to the Supplement. Fortunately Sir John Laughton was able to continue his series of naval articles, and Colonels Vetch and Lloyd their military series, and other old contributors were available. But there were many new hands, and therefore Lee reissued the rules for contributors in an enlarged form, and made his ten commandments into twelve. Lee himself wrote the lives of several Shakespearian scholars, and of some of his old contributors, besides an article upon Leslie Stephen which would have earned Stephen’s approval. But his chief contribution was a life of King Edward VII, sixty pages in length, marked by the same qualities as his account of Queen Victoria. It was sufficiently critical in its views to rouse some controversy, but it was so obviously honest that the King’s own papers were subsequently placed at Lee’s disposal for the purpose of writing a fuller biography. Without adequate evidence that he was in error he would alter nothing; objections raised to statements in the article would be duly considered when the book was written.

Lee was also called upon to answer people who objected to the Supplements on principle. They said that lives of persons so recently deceased were premature; that they were impressions, not considered verdicts, lacked historical perspective, and must be based on insufficient documentary evidence. However, the only rule laid down by Stephen in the original prospectus was that the eminent man should be dead; he was not required to have been dead for a generation, or some convenient number of years. Stephen’s practice conformed to his principle. Henry Fawcett died 6 November 1884, and Stephen published the life of his friend in 1885. Stephen’s brother Fitzjames died 11 March 1894, and the preface to Leslie’s life of him is dated 1 May 1895. Neither friendship, nor blood, nor nearness of time, affected the justice of his account of the two men. Time would have made the lives no better; it might have dimmed the clearness of his memories; it might have prevented the lives from being written, since he died in 1904. In Stephen’s view the danger was in delay, not in haste. ‘Any one’, wrote Stephen, ‘who like me has had much to do with biography must have been painfully impressed by the singular rapidity with which its materials vanish. Again and again I have had to lament the fact.’ Stephen’s view was Lee’s too. In defending what he termed ‘recent biography’ he asserted that the first-hand evidence of living contemporaries was ‘the most essential ingredient’ in any biography. He instanced Boswell’s Johnson and Lockhart’s Scott to prove that the earliest biographies were the best, and quoted Johnson’s warning against postponement. ‘If a life be delayed till interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but obtain little intelligence.’ xxiv