Ludwig Emil. Genius and Character

Transl. by Kenneth Burke. — New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927. — 376 p.The nature of a man is summarized in his portrait — and the great portrait-painters with pen or brush have all been great physiognomists. So that pictures, these silent betrayals, provide the biographer with material as valuable as letters, memoirs, speeches, conversations — when the scientific investigator has found them authentic — or as handwriting. For this reason, the biographer cannot obtain adequate results unless he has a picture of his subject to work from. The same applies to the accounts of a man's daily habits. These were formerly inserted like curiosities, little bonbons for the reader's palate. Anecdotes were recorded skeptically, shamefacedly, and as though by a lowering of professional dignity. Yet for us, the most trivial habit will often suggest the interpretation for some major trait of character, and the accredited anecdote becomes an epigram. Scientific biographies occasionally close with a chapter designed to show us the hero "as a man" — which is put in as a kind of insert, like the diagram of a battle or the facsimile of a page from a note book. But how is the portraitist to represent his subject except as a man? And what else must he do but trace this man's every thought and act, every motive and impulse, back to the indivisible elements of his personality?Introduction: on the writing of historyFrederick the Great
Baron von Stein
BismarckStanley
Peters
RhodesWilson
Rathenau
LeninLeonardo da Vinci
Shakespeare
Rembrandt's Self-portraitVoltaire in Eighteen Tableaux
Lord Byron and Lassalle
Goethe and SchillerDehmel
Balzac
Portrait of an Officer