“The truth is that any retraced story of bourgeois lives (lives other than great lives of ‘action’—et encore!) throws a chill upon the scene, the time, the subject, the small mapped-out facts, and if you find ‘great men thin’ it isn’t really so much their fault (and least of all yours) as that the art of the biographer—devilish art!—is somehow practically thinning: It simplifies while seeking to enrich—and even the Immortal are so helpless and passive in death.”
Henry James, letter to Henry Adams, Nov. 19, 1903