An Indian Journalist: Being the Life, Letters and Correspondence of Dr. Sambhu C. Mookerjee

There is something inexpressibly touching in the eagerness with which we strive to rend the veil concealing the personality of distinguished men. We love to see them in dishabille, so to speak: to know their inmost thoughts, the trivial incidents of their daily lives. No biographers retain a lasting hold on the public taste but those who gratify this universal passion. Like all our sentiments it is based on mixed motives. Curiosity is among them: but there is also a secret desire to compare our own sensations and impulses with those of our hero. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They live in their writings. And so their home and school life are trivial and common place. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resemble them.” This dictum, pace tanti viri, is wanting in truth as well as in originality. Men of the highest intellect are not gregarious. A craving for intercourse with others comes of a vacant mind : and the little knot who, in every age, hold high the lamp of progress shun the babble of the common herd. There are natures as pure, as dazzling, and as inaccessible as the highest peaks of the Himalayas: and not material for their life-story but a historian capable of assimilating it is generally wanting. And it is surely seldom the case that a great original thinker puts his best work in his books.