The Theory of Biography

Abstract

I have tried elsewhere to suggest the relation between biography and selfconsciousness and to show (chiefly with reference to political biographies) what happens when we abandon biographical intuition. Here I want to keep modern literary biography in mind as a paradigm and to look, first, the expressivist anthropology, to borrow Charles Taylor's term, in biographies in the West. I contend that the first biography to display a new romantic anthropology (seen clearly in the writings of Herder and Goethe) is Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791); but it will be evident to any reader of the century's literature that the is at least evident glimmeringly in both Rousseau and Voltaire and in British practice in the novel long before 1791. Richardson's novels example are expressivist just in the Herderian sense. I must keep in mind what (I think) might be the admonitions of eighteenth-century scholars such as my friends and betters Gwin Kolb, Edward Bloom, and the late Geoffrey Tillotson, and remember that it is difficult to speak confidently of direct influences in the realm of ideas after 1740: indeed, here, we need only look relationships. I contend that we have wrongly criticized the form of Boswell's Life because we do not see the general European theory that underlies it; when we isolate the underlying theory, we find adequate criteria modern biographical forms and thus a working theory of biography. It is important biography that while a new expressivist anthropology is formulated with optimism in the 1770's it gets a gloomy, anxious defense later. Underneath the famous rosy serenity in the Gespriiche mit Goethe (those conversations recorded by Eckermann between 1823 and 1832) is Goethe's despair over the concatenation of urban forces threatening the unique thing that man has been found to be. And, only a few years later, we find a Goetheadmirer and reader of Senancour and Girardin cataloguing all that is against us. It isn't perverse of me to approach the new expressivist anthropology through Arnold, because Arnold indicates some of the real pressure the theory is under in the twentieth century. Arnold is at Thun, in 1849, recovering from an affair with the blue-eyed Mary Claude who was baptized at Friedrichstadt and who has relatives at Geneva; a summer or two she has been intimate with Arthur and Anne Clough and Matthew and Tom Arnold (of the Clougho-Matthean set); and Arnold's letter to Clough reveals impatience with his old friends. He will not think of his brother Tom, for my dear Tom has not sufficient besonnenheit it to be any rest to think of him any more