The New York Times celebrates biographer Richard Holmes

When Richard Holmes set out years ago for south-central France, at 18, with a backpack and a preposterous-looking hat, he believed himself to be on the trail of Robert Louis Stevenson. He did not yet suspect that he had found his career. As he portrayed himself later, he made for a ludicrous figure, rummaging about, snuffling around, shredding the French language as pear juice streamed down his face. “I suppose a foreign affaire de coeur would have been the best thing of all; and that, in a way, was what I got,” he observes in the beguiling “Footsteps,” his masterly mash-up of memoir and biography.

Since that 1964 expedition Holmes has camped regularly in the 19th century. He is temperamentally well suited to the Romantic age. He does not so much write lives as haunt them; he seems to invade his subject’s dreams. Moonlight glints off his pages. Certainly no one has made the practice of biography sound so appealing. Here is Holmes, in a “glowing mist,” just after a 5 a.m. coffee in the French fields: “Then I went down to the Loire, here little more than a stream, and sat naked in a pool cleaning my teeth. Behind me the sun came out and the woodfire smoke turned blue. I felt rapturous and slightly mad.” He does for biography what Cheryl Strayed did for the Pacific Crest Trail.

Fifty-three years after that liquefied pear, Holmes remains no less ecstatic about tracking the dead and fixing them on the page. At the same time he is cleareyed about the blisters and bug bites, the hardships and mysteries that follow from entering into “an imaginary relationship with a nonexistent person, or at least a dead one.” Some hauntings have yielded essays rather than books. On one occasion, after Holmes slipped into a literary crevasse — the documentation having failed him — it yielded none. Sometimes the past is simply irrecoverable; you can’t get there from here. From his many years with Shelley he emerged spent, “grizzled, anecdotal, displaced.”

With a preternatural gift for place, Holmes qualifies as a virtuosic landscape painter. He has also regularly joined his subject on the page, an outgrowth, he reveals in his new book, “This Long Pursuit,” of his double-entry notation system. On one side of his notebook he documents his research. On the other he delivers his impressions. Empathy — “the biographer’s most valuable but perilous weapon” — joins the two. For Holmes, biography truly is an affaire de coeur. He measures his life in those doubly accounted descriptions. Fifteen years with the cyclone that was Coleridge equals 30 notebooks for 900 pages, or two volumes, of biography.

Holmes bought his first notebook for Stevenson; it is today one of nearly 200. Which leads him to reflect a little on what he has learned since that summer in the Cévennes. He has been down this discursive path before. With “Footsteps” he began what has turned into a cycle of works by a “Romantic biographer,” shapely nonfiction stories about lives and the art of writing them. He billed “Sidetracks,” his second, as a “personal casebook” or a sort of “sentimental education.” With “This Long Pursuit” he completes the trilogy. Holmes sees his new volume as a “declaration of faith,” though it is as much a book of parables. It includes as well his 10 tongue-in-cheek commandments. In his ninth Holmes prescribes an immodest pride in biography, an English gift to the world on a par with cricket and the full-cooked breakfast. With his 10th he advocates humility, as “we can never know, or write, the Last Word about the Human Heart.” The master admits, after all these years, that he remains mystified by his elusive art. ...