Organic Biography: The Death of an Art

Abstract

The influential Wellek and Warren, in their Theory of Literature, view biography as the servant of a scholarly master. They concede that certain biographies have their own “intrinsic interest,” but the main bias of their work is towards the perception of biography as a quarry from which facts are to be mined and then put to other uses.There seems to be little doubt that for the majority of biographies Wellek and Warren are correct, and their conclusions readily find support among the most serious surveys of the biographical tradition. Yet a disinterested bystander would surely observe with great curiosity how frequently in our age older and apparently outmoded factual mines are replaced by new ones. Moreover, he would surely be puzzled as he scrutinized the biographical scene more carefully and discovered in the background a number of works written between 1640 and 1851, which retain a perennial fascination and freshness and show no signs of becoming outmoded, despite numerous objections that they are unreliable and generally untrue. These works, which shall be called primary organic biographies, are defined below and include Walton's Lives, Burnet's Life of Hale and his Life of Rochester, Johnson's Life of Savage and his “Life of Thomson,” Goldsmith's Life of Nash, Boswell's Life of Johnson, and Carlyle's Life of Sterling.Universally regarded as works of art but castigated in varying degrees for the alleged unreliability of their facts and thus for their departure from the straight and narrow path of truth, the primary organic biographies are part of a tradition that critics have consistently failed to understand.