AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS INNER HISTORY: A VICTORIAN GENRE

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COPYRIGHTED by JOHN EDWARD KEATING 1950

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS INNER HISTORY: A VICTORIAN GENRE

BY

JOHN EDWARD KEATING A.B., Loyola University, Chicago, 1929 A.M., St. Louis University, 1933

THESIS SUBMITTED IN P A R T I A L F U L F I L L M E N T OF T H E

REQUIREMENTS

FOR T H E DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN E N G L I S H IN T H E GRADUATE COLLEGE OF T H E UNIVERSITY O F I L L I N O I S . 1950

URBANA. ILLINOIS

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS THE GRADUATE COLLEGE

L-Lf-J3>-. -

I HEREBY RECOMMEND THAT THE THESIS PREPARED UNDER MY SUPERVISION BY KMTTTT.F.D

ii>M-EDMM_MATING_

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS JOTEiLHJJSTQIlYi_A VICTORIAN GENRE

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DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY LPSOPHY IN ENGLISH

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a

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CONTENTS Pa

Chapter I.

II.

III.

VICTORIAN SELF-STUDY: PRINCIPLES

BACKGROUNDS, INFLUENCES, AND

1.

The Autooiography as a Guide to Victorian Thought .

1

2.

The Writing of Lives before the Nineteenth Century.

10

5.

The Romantic Impetus to oiography

21

4.

Influences upon Victorian Self-Study

28

5.

Critical Principles for the Genre

45

THE SEARCH FOR FUNDAMENTAL VALUES 1.

Introduction

2.

Harriet iVlartineau (lfa02-1676):

3.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1681): Reminiscences

5^ Autobiography . . .

61

Sartor Resartus and

4.

John Stuart Mill (1&06-1&73):

5.

Evaluation

76 Autobiography. . . .

105 120

THE DH^ARUP OF EVANGELICAL ORTHODOXY 1.

Introduction

133

2.

Religious Autobiographies of Anglicans

138

3.

Francis William Newman (1805-1697):

147

4.

John Henry Newman (lbOl-1890): Vita Sua

5. IV.

Se

Phases of Faith

Apologia pro

Evaluation

165 179

THE TRANSMUTATION OF SPECIES AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THOUGHT 1.

Introduction

2.

Hugh Miller (1802-1856): Schoolmasters

190 Mj Schools and 195

iii Chapter

V.

VI.

Page 3.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903):

An Autooiography . .

208

4.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882):

"Autooiography" . . .

223

5.

Evaluation

THE BEGINNINGS OF DEMOCRATIC COLLECTIVISM 1.

Introduction

2.

William Lovett (1800-1877): The Life and Struggles of Vt 1111am Lovett

3.

Beatrice toebb (1658-1943):

4.

Evaluation

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY YI

™

241

251

My Apprenticeship. . .

257 276 293 303 314

324

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My interest in the autobiographical aspects of Victorian literature was stimulated during my undergraduate days by Professor Morton Dauwen Zaoel. When I undertook doctoral studies, Professor Gordon N. Ray warmly responded to my suggestion that this interest might form the basis for a detailed investigation of Victorian autobiography. Professor Ray has guided my researches with unfailing encouragement and discerning counsel; he has patiently assisted me in giving shape to my findings in the present essay.

Professors Donald A. Smalley and Royal A. Gettmann

have likewise been generously helpful in many ways.

Many

other persons at the University of Illinois—faculty members, friends, library staff members—have given valuable, often indispensable, assistance.

To all of the

afore-mentioned I am sincerely grateful. John E. Keating

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS INNER HISTORY:

A VICTORIAN GENRE

CHAPTER I VICTORIAN SELF-STUDY: 1.

BACKGROUNDS, INFLUENCES, AND PRINCIPLES

The Autooiography as a Guide to Victorian Thought

One of the most obvious and pervasive differences between the literature of the first half of the eighteenth century and that of the first half of the twentieth century lies in the growth of interest in individual consciousness.

If we compare Thomson's

Seasons, for instance, with Eliot's The Wasteland, we see how the growth of interest in individual consciousness has affected poetry. We can ooserve the same shift from the objective and typical to the subjective and particular in fiction by comparing Fielding's Tom Jones with Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; in criticism, Dy comparing Pope's Essay on Criticism with Edmund Wilson's The Triple Thinkers.

Even in theological writing the

modern stress on the individual and his experience appears when we turn from butler's Analogy of Religion to William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience. The change in attitude has affected not only literature, the other arts, and philosophy, but social and political thought, and even science and medicine.

In spite of sweeping regimentation and

mechanization of life, governments have shown a new concern for individual welfare and education.

Psychology has been oriented

anew—practically reestablished—and set in quest of the

2 subconscious.

"Psychosomatic medicine" has oecome at least one of

the catchwords of the day. Stress on the individual, then, is one of the important factors in modern thought.

Attention to its development should illuminate

important characteristics of the literature at either end of the two-hundred-year period in question and should make clearer the nature of the transition which has taken place.

Various aspects of

the change might oe studied in later eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century poetry, in the development of the familiar essay, or in the emergence of psychological fiction.

Even more available

for analysis and more immediately concerned with the transition in thought is the group of autobiographies left by the Victorians. These autobiographies show, as we shall see, that the definitive stage of the transition occurred during Victoria's reign; they provide records of the intellectual and spiritual experience of the time and examples of a genre developed in the expression of that experience. No period has been more concerned with setting down lifeexperience than the Victorian age.

Perhaps the most obvious illus-

tration of the handling of problems within an organic framework is to oe found in various oiographical enterprises.

There are careful

attempts at recovering earlier life-stories, like Masson's Milton, Morley's Rousseau, and Craik's Swift, and the inception of a comprehensive dictionary of biography.

To preserve contemporary life-

records, the Victorians established the authorized biography, a valuable if not always completely reliable account,

but what

especially distinguishes the Victorian tendency to view proole

in an organic framework is to oe found in the diverse manifestations of the autobiographical Impulse.

Letters and journals take up the

problems of the time with conscious intensity.

A similar concern

appears in much of the poetry and fiction—in reflective lyrics like Arnold's "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" and Clough's "Easter Day," in longer poems like Tennyson's In Memoriam and James Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night, and in novels like William Hale White's Mark Rutherford books and Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh.

The distinctly personal response to the questions of the

age is to be found above all in the long series of explicit autobiographies which begins with Sartor Resartus (1833-1834) and ends as the Victorian record is closed in the present century.

Many of

these are hardly more than the jottings of raconteurs; others combine reminiscence and reflection; some oustanding examples capture the spirit of the time and the challenge of its problems as they came home to great personalities. It Is with explicit autobiographies that we shall be concerned in the present study.

Letters and journals generally present occa-

sional and limited views rather than deliberate accounts of a lifeexperience; poetic and fictional materials raise the problem of distinguishing between historical and fictive elements.

Valuable

though all of these forms are for the study of the period, it is in the autooiography properly so called—the narrative of the whole of the writer's life or of some considerable section or phase of it — that we may most conveniently find the materials for studying in a personal framework the Victorian intellectual evolution.

i

Even here

there must be the further limitation already suggested, the exclusion

lis

of autoDiographies which are largely reminiscences of external happenings; such accounts naturally throw little light on the inmost concerns of the age.

The type of personal record to be examined in

this study, then, is that which students of the form have called the subjective autooiography, the autobiography in which the intellectual and spiritual experiences of the writer are prominent, rather than the external events of his life. The special value of these works for the present purpose lies in the fact that they present the thought of the age as it were without any intervening medium, and the very choice of literary form reflects the peculiar significance, in Victorian thought, of the Individual thinker. Autobiography as a genre has been little studied, and the Victorian autobiographies as a group have never been examined in relation to the thought of their age.

Yet it seems clear that in

the reappraisal of the Victorian period which has gone on in recent years, the autooiographies should be of special importance.

To

counter the disparagement of the Victorians during the 1920's, Dean Inge proposed that critics study their portraits.

In the

belief that "since the golden age of Greece (assuming that we can trust the portrait ousts of the famous Greeks) no age can boast so The first notaole treatment of autooiography as a form is Anna Robeson ourr's The Autooiography: a Critical and Comparative ktudy (ooston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1909TT" A much more valuable work is Charles Wayne Shumaker's English Autooiography: Its Materials. Structure, _and Technique (unpublished doctoral , dissertation; University of California, 1943). Zaldee Eudora Green's N^ejbeenth Century Autobiography (unpublished doctoral dissertation; \ Cornell University, 1933) is largjly a series of character studies, i In Victorian Religious Liberalism Reflected in Autooiography (unpub- ! i lished doctoral dissertation; University of Illinois, 1948), | Robert H. Moore utilizes the Victorian autobiographies to illustrate I a special phase of thought.

5 many magnificent types of the human countenance," he felt that their 2 very features might win over adversaries.

With photographs of

George Eliot and Herbert Spencer beside Richmond's Newman and Millais's Ruskin, the effectiveness of the procedure may be questioned.

The method even suffers from the preoccupation with exter-

nals which vitiated the judgment of the critics in question. Still, more regard for the Victorians as persons might have corrected an engrossment with their incidental shortcomings and foibles. The shift in attitudes toward the nineteenth century makes concern with personalities no longer necessary as a defence measure; both attack and defence have given way to the more aifficult problem of understanding.

At present, study of the Victorian mind is needed

as a corrective for some of the tendencies which have accompanied revival of sympathy with the period.

A generation ago, the age was

ridiculed for its supposed naivete and smugness; now, popularly at least, it is recalled somewhat wistfully for its security and coziness.

The success of The Barretts of Wimpole Street and Victoria

Regina, the ever-increasing vogue of Dickens's Christmas Carol, and the rediscovery of Trollope Illustrate a tendency to sentimentalize the Victorians.

It remains the critic's task to go oehind the

facade of the age and the appearance of its people to the essentials of character and thought.

The direction which Professor Harrold

pointed out for'investigation a decade ago is still significant: "...perhaps more important than the purely historical and bibliographical work that beckons one to the Victorians is the study of The Victorian Age," Outspoken Essays. Second Series (London and New York: Longmans, 1923), p. 200.

the psychology and genealogy of their beliefs, and the grounds for their aesthetic expression in verse and prose." The study of the psychology and genealogy of Victorian beliefs must DO one of great complexity, for the age included viewpoints as diverse and as intensely personal as those of Macaulay and Carlyle, of Swinburne and Christina Rossetti.

Nor was there even

stability in diversity; individual outlooks shifted under the influence of intellectual currents which ranged from the Oxford Movement and the aesthetic movement to Chartism and the controversy on evolution.

For active minds, unsettlement, crisis, and reorienta-

tion were the common experience of the period. How far can we trust personal records as a guide through these complex intellectual situations?

It may be plausibly argued that

autobiographies, whatever their interest as personal documents, cannot oe greatly relied on for the history of thought.

Autobiog-

raphers may well be guilty of reticences, concealments, and lapses of memory; what is more damaging, they may, even unconsciously, be animated by egotism or the urge for self-justification.

Mrs. Humphry

Ward, for instance, believed that the most genuine accounts of personal experience in the nineteenth century are to be found in fictional adaptations of autobiography.

The English, she felt, "are

not fond of direct 'confessions,'" and consequently all English autobiographical-literature, compared with the French or German, shows "a touch of dryness and reserve."

Much more unfavoraDle

judgments have been passed on the trustworthiness of individual 3

"Recent Trends in Victorian Studies, 1932-1939," SP, 37 (1940), p. 695. 4

"'Marius the Epicuz'ean,'" Macmillan's Magazine, 52 (1885), 134.

7 autobiographies like Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua and Carlyle's Reminiscences. In turning to the Victorian autobiographies as sources for the thought of the period, we must allow such criticism its proper weight.

An autobiography, it must be admitted, should be read

guardedly; it should be studied in the light of the other sources which contribute to our knowledge of the author's life-experience— his published works and letters, contemporary accounts of him, and later critical estimates. Yet, when we have admitted the need of all these safeguards, the autobiographies remain unique fonts of information and insight. In the first place, personal records provide material available from no other source. We may question an autobiographer's interpretations and judgments—John Stuart Mill's estimate of his wife, for example—but the factual material contained in most autobiographies is largely unimpeachable.

Allowing for suppressions and errors in

detail, we must suppose that if any account of a man's thought and convictions Is possible, he himself must be the first authority. For the general accuracy of the autobiographies to be considered in this study there is an abundance of confirmatory evidence.

They

stand the tests of internal criticism, since they reveal a general consistency in their parts, and the inclusion of unflattering facts shows that the writers are not mere apologists.

The statements in

the autobiographies dovetail with what can oe gathered from the autnors' other writings and from the reports of their contemporaries. But the importance of the autobiographies goes beyond mere factual information.

They are significant for their emphases—for

8 the indications of what representative thinkers took to be the main issues of the time.

They are significant for their disclosure of

representative minds at work—for their presentation of the assumptions, processes, and goals of Victorian thought.

The autobiog-

raphies are significant, finally, for their revelation of the intangible factors in that thought—for their record of such influences as reading, social life, friendships, disagreements. What gives particular value to all of these elements is the form in which they are cast, a form which necessitates a considerable degree of finality in selection and evaluation. These values in autobiography may oe seen, for example, even in a specimen too mediocre to deserve extended study.

Samuel Smiles

has become a byword as an apostle of Philistinism to the adolescent, and this estimate of him is in part documented by his Autobiography. It reveals a man with small esteem for some of his contemporaries who sacrificed themselves in quest of truth and with considerable esteem for Leeds, where he found "little art... [but] a great deal of common sense and public spirit."

Yet it reveals a man of at least

average intelligence and good will, a man of some cultural interests and social conscience.

His plea for the erection of a public

library and museum at Leeds anticipates a little of Ruskin's demand for public munificence: What was the- cost of our gaol? What of our pauper training schools? We have built these irrespective of the question of cost. Are we to have it said of us that we lack spirit to get up any public buildings, excepting they be for the purposes of accommodating criminals and paupers?6 5 he 'l' Autobiography of Samuel Smiles, LL.D., Thomas Mackay, ed. (New York: Dutton, 190577 PP. 11-12, 53-58, 87. £2

The same, p. 156.

9 For Smiles the sceptred isle is great because of "our perseverance, our industry, our inventiveness, our constructiveness, our supremacy in commerce, our love of home, and yet our love of the sea"; still he believed England's essential greatness to lie not in the invention of the steam-engine, the locomotive, and the screw steamer, but in the diffusion of "certain social, political, and religious ideas, unlike those to be found in any other portion of the civilized world." The fragments suggest the deficiencies of Smiles's thought as well as certain more attractive tendencies in it. The Autobiography as a whole is significant as revealing not the straw man commonly accepted, even today, as the typical Victorian, but a man not more limited than his average successor and possessing interests which to some extent counterbalance his limitations. Even a minor autooiography like Smiles's shows a personal earnestness and a measure of social concern which may be taken as indicative of the Victorian consciousness and conscience rendering an account of life. The object of the present study will be to examine accounts of life rendered by more important writers—to analyze and to evaluate the disclosures of self-and-world given by representative Victorian thinkers.

No final judgment need be attempted as to the value of

these autobiographies in comparison to the other sources for investigating Victorian thought-.

In particular—to recur to the point

urged by Mrs. Ward—the value of the direct as opposed to the veiled autobiography may oe left an open question.

As material for the

study of ideas, the advantages of the two forms are to some extent 7 The same, pp. 275-76.

10 counterbalanced:

the autoDiographer is presumably more exact, but

may oe embarrassed or reticent; the autobiographical novelist speaks more freely, out may heighten his material unduly, or even distort it. What seems desirable is to explore the largely unexploited materials of autoDiographies which cast light on the chief areas of Victorian thought, to bring out certain fundamental ideas in the inner history of the age, and to examine the autobiographies as specimens of a genre in which content and form are peculiarly adapted to one another. 2.

The Writing of Lives before the Nineteenth Century

To see the Victorian autooiography in perspective, we may consider some phases of earlier developments.

The beginnings of the

prose autobiography in English go back to The Vocacyon of lohan Bal

Q to the Bishoprick of Qssorie in Ireland, his Persecucions in Q

the

sa

me. and finall nelyveraunce. published at Rome in 1553.

And

yet, Mrs. curr observes, As a fashion, tne personal record in England dates practically from Rousseau....after Gibbon and Rousseau and the French Revolution, the fashion takes a firm hold on English literary energies; the autobiography widened, deepened, heightened steadily in value until it reached its zenith in the middle years of the nineteenth century.9 The Confessions of Rousseau was published in 1782; an English translation came out in the following year.

There had oeen, of course,

numerous personal- records- in England during the two preceding centuries.

The Confessions, Gibbon's Memoirs, and the French Revolution

were not the only influences that aroused the autobiographical 8, Donald A. Stauffer, English Biography before 1700 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 193077 P« 178. 9

The Au^o^iogiiaphy, pp. 206-207.

impulse; nor did the new tradition in personal records supersede and eliminate the earlier one. Nevertheless, until the end of the eighteenth century the autobiography tended to be a chronicle of what had happened to a man rather than of what had happened within him, of external events rather than of internal developments. A new stress on the introspective and imaginative aspects of the individual life becomes apparent in Romantic writing, whether expressly autobiographic or only incidentally so.

To "self-

consciousness, that daemon of the men of genius of our time, from Wordsworth to Byron, from Goethe to Chateaubriand," wrote John Stuart Mill, "...this age owes...much both of its cheerful and its mournful wisdom."

Amid the intellectual and social crises of the Victorian

period, this preoccupation with the self is enlarged to include an outlook on the world as seen through the experience of the autooiographer, and in the great examples not merely the self or the age, but the self-in-the-age is revealed.

To secure an adequate perspec-

tive for mid-nineteenth-century autobiography, we may proceed to document these general positions in some detail. During the seventeenth century and on till some time after the middle of the eighteenth, there was a comparative impersonality in literature and indeed in all art.

This is not to say that people

lacked interest in themselves as individuals, but rather that the dignity of literary treatment was reserved for more general concerns. That Bacon should take over the title of Montaigne's Essais, but so little of their spirit of intimacy, is a significant index of the literary temper.

There were, it is true, such expressions of

"rsentham," Dissertations and Discussions (London: [1905]), p. 290.

Routledge

12 individualism as Sir Thomas Browne's Rellgio Medici and Cowley's "Of Myself," but on the whole It was a time for Paradise_ Lost and An Essay on Man, not for The Prelude and In Memorlam. Two manifestations of this lack of interest in the personal may be observed from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the latter part of the eighteenth:

the lacunae in biographical litera-

ture in general and the impersonality of autobiographies, both religious and secular. The lacunae in biographical literature until late in the eighteenth century are as significant as the limitations of the biographies which were

actually written.

"The Elizabethan and

seventeenth century Lives," says Professor Mark Longaker, "were not biographies at all."

Men whose civic or intellectual position

would in later times certainly have suggested a substantial written memorial were indifferent to such honors, even when they were themselves writers.

In attempting to provide accounts of five of his

contemporaries, Izaak Walton expresses the wish "that as that learned Jew, Josephus, and others, so these men had also writ their own lives"; but he adds, "...it is not the fashion of these times."

Neither the suoject of the biography nor the biographer

was concerned with preserving a record of the inner problems of thought and decision. Thus, one of Walton's subjects, John Donne, had led a life of both worldly and spiritual adventure, and had wide fame as a preacher; Walton had the advantage of knowing him personally.

Yet Walton's

. . English biography in the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ld3lTT~P *~12 j j j a l t o n ' s L i v e s , Tnomas Zouch, e d . ( n o s t o n , 1 8 6 5 ) , p . 4 6 .

life is tantalizingly incomplete and untrustworthy.

His treatment

of so important a matter as the ordination of a descendant of Thomas More's family in the Established Church is brief and altogether inaccurate.^

The numerous letters and the hundred-and-

sixty sermons of Donne which have been preserved do not afford even the materials for an Apologia pro Vita Sua, much less any attempt at such a document. Milton was so markedly a public man that the externals of his life have been better preserved, and yet so crucial a date as the beginning of Paradise Lost is a matter of conjecture.

In 1872 the

Reverend James Graham published The Autooiography of Milton, a collection of passages from Milton's writings.

The contrast between the

seventeenth-century viewpoint and the nineteenth-century is revealing.

For .iilton, these matters were incidental; in the De Doctrlna

Christiana. for instance, he gives his religious views not as conclusions from experience, but as an impersonal treatise.

The

nineteenth-century Miltonist tried to supply that which Milton himself had largely disregarded. Dryden, again, is of central importance in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and yet he remains almost as impersonal a figure as Shakespeare.

The relatively few letters of his which have

been preserved are not revealing, and the poems which commemorate his religious changes, Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther, are controversial tracts, not persorial narratives. As late as Johnson's Lives of the Poets a disregard of the inner aspects of life is ooservaole. 3

It Is true that Johnson loved

Edmund Gosse, The Life and Letters of John Donne (2 vols.: London, 1899), I, 57 ff.

14 14 the biographical part of literature most, that he believed those relations "commonly of most value in which the writer tells his own 15 story,"

and that he adopted the biographic approach for introduc-

tions to the poets; still, the Lives are in the main literary criticism.

Available information concerning the personal lives of many

of nis subjects was not aDundant, nor was Johnson greatly concerned to exhaust such sources as there were.

Boswell arranged to have

Lord Marchmont, who had known Pope personally, call on Johnson and give his reminiscences.

For some reason Johnson was irritated by

the offer. JOliWSON. "I shall not oe in town tomorrow. I don't care to know aoout Pope." MRb. TilRALa (surprized as I was, and a little angry.) "1 suppose, Sir, Mr. Boswell tnou ht, that as you are to write Pope's Life, you would wish to know aoout him." JOHNSON. "Wish! why yes. If it rained knowled0e, I'd hold out my nand; out I would not give myself the trouble to O o in quest ol it."16 Jonnson's remark was a matter of momentary pique, and afterwards he saw Lord Marchmont.

Still it is significant that Johnson considered

the life of Cowley his oest, "on account of the dissertation which it contains on the Metaphysical Poets."

The biography of Cowley,

a sketch of a dozen pages, Is somewhat less than one-fourth the length of the "dissertation" and the criticism of Cowley's poems. If the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were relatively unconcerned with the revelation of the inner life in biography, it 14 D o s w e l l ' s L i f e of J o h n s o n , G. b . H i l l and L. F . P o w e l l , (4 v o l s . ; Oxford: Clarendon P r e s s , 1 9 3 4 ) , I , 4 2 5 . 15 The Idler, no. 84 (Works, IV; Oxford, 1825), p. 399. 16 L.oswell's Life of Johnson. Ill, 344. 17

The same, IV, 38.

edd.

would yet seem that this aspect of the subject-matter might be represented in the autobiographies. ality operates even here.

But the tendency to imperson-

The religious autobiography was the most

widely practised type; both Fox and Wesley kept journals, and both Quakers and Methodists developed a strong tradition of setting down their experiences.

Very little of the autobiographical writing

which resulted has any literary merit.

It is quite possible for a

writer to give account of an intense religious experience while excluding all the interests which would give his work general significance.

Certain qualities of religious experience—frequently

found, if not genuinely belonging to it—favor this tendency.

Reli-

gious dedication may tend to absorb all the devotee's faculties, at the expense of every other interest; it may tend to depreciate man in presence of the Deity; it may require that the individual merely accept, rather than form, standards of thought and conduct. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, perhaps the best-known religious confession of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, shows all of these characteristics.

It is an extraordinarily

intimate, sincere, and pathetic revelation, but, as Leslie Stephen pointed out, Bunyan tells us little of his early life, nothing of his tinkering, nothing of the death of his first wife, who seems to have been the great spiritualizing force upon him.

"The book is

therefore a profoundly interesting account of one phase in the development of the character of our great prose-poet; out nardly an autobiography."18

The interest of Grace Abounding is so special-

ized that it has probably found acceptance in general literature at "Autobiography," Hours in a Library (new edition, vol. 13 1: London, 1892), p. 239.

least partly because of the appeal of the atypical and because of its historical position.

Since it is essentially a record of the

acceptance of the religious outlook which it represents, It would seem almost to exhaust the possibilities in Its field; we can hardly conceive of a literary development which included many books of comparable narrowness. Investigation of the large literature of similar works appears to substantiate this view.

Mrs. Burr speaks of the "astonishingly

little vitality" of seventeen Quaker autobiographies which she studied.

"When they write of perplexities, of conversion, of

prayer, of meeting, they all employ the same style, the same terms of expression."

She observes that this conventionalization "may

be noticed, to a certain extent, in later Wesleyan and Methodist movements; for a similarity exists through the whole revival initiated Dy the Puritans and the Quakers."20 Professor Stauffer comes to much the same conclusion: The danger, of course, with the autoDiographies of both Friends and Wesleyans was that in such enthusiastic corporate communion the writing of lives might oe reduced to a formula, and the resultant products might turn out to oe conventional exercises couched in a special jargon. Unfortunately, in most cases this was true.^1 Grace Abounding is perhaps the only religious autobiography of the entire period which has won a place in general literature; and this has come aoout not because it records the experience of a rich or even a normal human mind, out because of its personal pathos and historic significance. 19 The Autooiography, p. 236. u ^ The same, p. 240.

17 In the secular, as in the religious autobiography, individual thought and outlook are relatively undeveloped.

Stauffer notes as

characteristic of the form before 1700, with some important exceptions, "the objective quality of early autooiographers, their unconscious neglect of those opportunities for self-analysis which ordinarily lend a fascination to this branch of literature." Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the father of Deism, was among the important thinkers of" the first half of the century.

When, toward the

close of his life, the author of De Veritate wrote his autobiography, he composed a "tale of picturesque escapades, recorded with incomparable vanity, which gives little suggestion of his philosophical powers."

p^

Clarendon's Life "might be thought more a history than

a biography were it not for the persistent intrusion of 'Mr. Hyde' 24 or 'the Chancellor.'" Roger North's autobiography, though treating] of a more domestic existence than Herbert's or Clarendon's, shows the same lack of the Introspective quality.

It remains on the

superficial level of the practical arrangements of life. North is constantly turning from himself to long digressions on the people he has occasion to mention, and fails to give any account of his own deeper self. North may be excused for not achieving a philosophical selfportrait on the ground that his was not an intellectual life, but Hume's autooiographical sketch, which comes half a century later, is a remarkable illustration of the external quality which continued to 22

English biography before 1700, p . 175. 23 Meyrick H. Carre, "Introduction," De Veritate, translated with an introduction (University of Bristol, 1937), p. 9. 24 English Biography before 1700, p. 190.

I

18 dominate personal records. Hume was probably the most revolutionary thinker of the century in history, philosophy, and religion, and yet his autobiography would reveal him almost as an intellectual automaton.

He wrote the sketch of himself a few months before his death

as an introduction to what was, in the event, a posthumous edition of his works.

To judge from it, the views which were earth-shaking

in the lives and thought of others meant hardly more than mathematical demonstrations to their proponent:

"It may be thought an

instance of vanity that I pretend at all to write my life; but this Narrative shall contain little more than the History of my Writings; as, indeed, almost all my life has been spent in literary pursuits 25 and occupations."

Hume gives no account of the genesis and per-

sonal background of his thought and of his controversial activity; he barely alludes to his friendships and travels. There is a rather forced insistence on his own tranquillity and cheerfulness, even in prospect of death: I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company. I consider, besides, that a man of sixty-five, oy dying, cuts off only a few years of infirmities; and though I see many symptoms of my literary reputation's breaking out at last with additional lustre, I knew that I could have out few years to enjoy it. It is difficult to be more detached from life than I am at present.26 This high detachment can hardly be altogether characteristic; it can hardly be reconciled, for instance, with the known vehemence of Hume's political feelings. A certain artificiality in the entire account makes it appear that even in such meager details as Hume 25

The Life of David Hume, Esq., written by himself (London, 1777), pp. 1-2. 25

The same, pp. 31-32.

19 gives, he is writing, as he suggests, a "funeral oration" rather than an autooiography. Two lives which were being written around the year 1790 sum up the technique and outlook of this first era of modern English personal records. One a oiography, one an autobiography, each treats a character altogether different from the character treated in the other work; each manifests a spirit altogether different from the spirit animating the other treatment:

Boswell's hero-worshipping

account of Johnson and Giobon's detached account of himself. Yet for all their differences, there is a fundamental similarity of approach:

each presents an objective outlook on its subject and

relies primarily on externals to give an impression of the inner man. Each takes up the questions of personal philosophy sufficiently to set it off from purely objective lives and to suggest the transition from their objectivity to a new concern with the individual.

Yet

each preserves a consiaeraole reticence aoout the inmost concerns of the subject.

The Johnson of the Prayers and Meditations is not

primarily the subject of the Life; Gibbon kept a journal for thirty years, out quotes only one series of passages from it. So perfectly aoes Giooon utilize his chosen autobiographical technique that the result may seem closer to the revelation of the genuinely suojective autobiography than it really is. To some extent be may have forecast a change in attitudes by his faithfulness to the position that the details of private life are matter "most essential and important for a biography."27

But Giobon's conception

of an individual life rests on the individual biological and social

history, rather than on the individual intellectual and spiritual history.

He sets the keynote for his account in the sentence that

announces his oirth:

"Decency and ignorance cast a veil over the

mystery of generations, but I may relate that after floating nine months in a liquid element I was painfully transported into the vital air." 28

The vitality of the Memoirs rests on their felicity

in depicting temperament and manners, not on any concern with the fundamentals of character and philosophy.

The acceptance of decency

and ignorance as inevitable limitations of human knowledge precludes any searching inquiry into the Dasic problems of life.

"Gibbon

merely changed his religion as he changed his opinion upon some antiquarian controversy; it is a question as to the weight of historical evidence, like the question aoout the sixth Aeneid, or a go

dispute aoout the genealogy of the house of Brunswick.

As a

philosopher, he is content with the view that "our lives are in the 30 power of chance." Eliminating mystery from consideration, he substitutes learning, urbanity, and tolerance, all leavened with a half-cynical, half-humorous practical wisdom.

The character of the

Memoirs is indicated by the passages which he quotes from his journal; relatively devoid of the rhetoric which ornaments the rest of the narrative, they suggest to what an extent the latter is a work of conscious art rather than a spontaneous revelation. The eighteenth-century achievement has led Professor Stauffer to conclude his valuable study with the judgment that eighteenthThe same, p. 24. oq

^Stephen, "Autooiography," p. 268. ^0 Memoirs, p. 138. For a fuller statement see p. 186

21 century biography represents a culmination after which nineteenthcentury must be regarded as a decline.

Quoting a reviewer's descrip-

tion of the ideal of biography in 1800, he remarks, Such a oroad conception of the functions and effects of biography could be made only in an age of achievement and vitality. Its varied demands are not satisfied so fully either in the severiteentii or the nineteenth century; in the eighteenth century, oiography was in full flower.... the eighteenth century, for originality, art, and truth to human experience, is the golaon age of English biography.^1 Assumptions and taste would seem to enter into a judgment which places Roger North and William Mason among "The Great Names" and excludes from the golden age biographers and autobiographers like Garlyle, Newman, Lockhart, Forster, Trevelyan, and Morley. present time it is prooably wiser to suspend judgment.

At the

Further

investigation of many aspects of both eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury oiography seems desirable before definitive general evaluations are reached. 3.

The Romantic Impetus to Biography

The most superficial examination of the tendencies which brought about the Romantic movement will suggest the impulse it gave toward a more intimate kind of biography and toward autooiography. As early as 1797 Lamb praises Coleridge's Poems in terms that make clear the influence of Rousseau and the ideal of self-revelation that was developing:

I

"I love them as I love the Confessions of

Rousseau, and for the same reason:

the same frankness, the same

openness of heart, the same disclosure of all the most hidden and 31 % The Art of Biography in Eighteenth Century England, p. 552. '

22 delicate affections of the mind...."

The period was, as Coleridge

said in discussing biography, "emphatically the age of personality."

Although Boswell's Johnson is in many respects a work of

the preceding age in its attitude toward the individual, it certainly manifests enough concern with the inner life to indicate a transition.

Much more explicit influence came from the utterly personal

and self-revealing Confessions of Rousseau.

The new outlook becomes

apparent in the work of the Romantic critics.

The word "autooiog-

raphy" is apparently a coinage of the time; the first occurrence recorded by the Oxford Dictionary is in a review by Southey in 1809. Hazlitt thought that Rousseau had perhaps greater influence In modern times than anyone else, that his chief quality was extreme sensioility—"the most intense consciousness of his own existence" 54 —and that the Confessions is the most valuable of his 35 works.

In a discussion "On Reason and Imagination" Hazlitt says

that he hates people who are "for having maps, not pictures of the world we live in," who insist that In treating of human nature, of moral good and evil, the nominal differences are alone of any value, or that In describing the feelings and motives of nen, any thing that conveys the smallest idea of what those feelings are in any given circumstances, or can by parity of reason ever be in any others, is a deliberate attempt at artifice and delusion....36 32 Letters, 1796-1820, E. V. Lucas, ed. (Works, VI; London: Methuen, 19057, p. 55. 33 The Friend, m,. a". T. Shedd, ed. (Works, II; New York, 1854), p. 328. ' "On the Character of Rousseau," The xtound Taole, P.P. Howe, ed. (Works, IV; London and Toronto: Dent, 19357," p. 68. 35 36

"0n ttie Love of tne Country," the same, p. 17.

The Plain Speaker, P . p . Howe, ea. (Works, XII; London and Toronto: Dent, 1931), p. 44.

i

23 Hazlitt goes on to work out the positive aspect of this viewpoint: The interest we take in our own lives, in our successes or disappointments, and the home feelings that arise out of these, when well described, are the clearest and truest mirror in which we can see the ima,_,e of human nature. For in this sense each man is a microcosm. What he is, the rest are—whatever his joys and sorrows are composed of, theirs are the same—no more, no less....Man is (so to speak) an endless and infinitely vsriea repetition: and if we know what one man feels, we so far know what a thousand feel in the sanctuary of their oeing.37 In the preceding literary generation, Johnson had taken it as a principle of criticism that "nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature."

Hazlitt's abhor-

rence of the abstract and his concern with the individual and the intimate are indications of a new spirit and new standards in criticism. Yet as far as explicit biography and autobiography are concerned, the Romantic influence was apparently not immediately effective.

It resulted, It is true, in such a specialized kind of auto-

oiography as De Quincey's Confessions of an English Qplum-Bater (1821-1822); in Hazlitt's Liber Amoris (1823), an equally specialized autobiographical fragment; in Trelawney's nighly-colored Adventures of a Younger Son (1831); and in tiyron's memoirs, which Hobhouse destroyed, for easily imaginaole reasons, after Byron's death.

Later

in the century there is an autumnal development of memoirs with a Romantic background:

Haydon's, Tom Moore's, Hunt's, Hobhouse's,

De Quincey's Autobiographic Sketches, and Trelawney's Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and byron. A note-worthy indication of general interest in autooiography toward the close of the Romantic Period is the publication in 37

The same, pp. 54-55.

M |

f

24 thirty-four volumes of Autooiography:

a Collection of the Most

Instructive and Amusing Lives Ever Published, Written by the Parties Themselves.38 The parties form a diverse company. The series begins with Colley Cibber's Apology, but goes back to take in the works of earlier memoirists—Cellini, Lord Herbert, and the astrologer William Lilly.

Continental literature is represented by

Marmontel, Goldoni, and Kotzebue; English, by Hume, Gibbon, and Gifford.

Religious life is represented by W'hitefield and Milton's

Quaker friend, Thomas Ellwood; the demimonde, by Madame du Barri and Charlotte Charke.

In occupational interests the auto biographers

show a wide range; the series includes the detective Vidocq, the traveler Robert Drury, and the time-serving politician George Bubb Dodington.

The widespread gleaning necessary to bring this col-

lection together, the quality of some of the narratives included, and the comparative absence of great English names among the writers are fairly indicative of the poverty of English autobiography at the close of the Komantlc period. During the time of the Romantic movement proper, the shift to personal interests and individual standards manifested itself more strongly in such fields as criticism, the essay, and poetry.

In

criticism, the judicial approach of the preceding age yielded to a considerable measure of the personal and impressionistic; Coleridge's Biograph!a Literaria, tne most substantial piece of the period, is a kind of critical autooiography.

In the essay, the social and

didactic types were overshadowed oy a development which reaches its culmination in Lamb's use of recollection and reverie. 58

London, 1826-1832

In poetry

25 aoove all, an extraordinary personal intensity renewed lyric and reflective forms and created such directly autobiographical narrative as The Prelude and such veiled autobiography as Childe Harold, Don Juan, and Alastor. Conventional autobiography at the time seems to have been a continuation or even intensification of the sensational accounts common in the eighteenth century. autobiography:

Thus in 1808 Scott began his

"The present age has discovered a desire, or rather

a rage, for literary anecdote and private history, that may be well permitted to alarm one who has engaged in a certain degree the attention of the public."0

A little later Coleridge made a lengthy

attack on gossipy memoirs. He castigated the "mania" for sensationalism and ruled out preoccupation with "biographical minutiae, which render the real character almost invisible, like clouds of dust on a portrait, or the counterfeit frankincense which smokeblacks the favourite idol of a Roman Catholic village."40

Biography

should be a contribution to useful knowledge; it should set forth greatness of mind, should fix attention on "those qualities and actions which have made a particular life worthy of Deing recorded."41

As late as 1827 a reviewer in The Quarterly, in a slash-

ing critique of ten recently published autobiographies remarks sarcastically: 39,Memoirs of the Early Life of Sir Walter Scott, written by himself (in J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, vol. I; boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 190277 P» 1. 40 The Friend, p. 326. 41 The same, p. 328.

26 ...one sad reproach of our literature, to wit, Its poverty, as compared with the French, in the article of memoirs, bids fair to oe wiped away in our 'Life and Times.' The classics of the papier mache age of our drama have taken up tne salutary belief that England expects every driveller to do his Memorabilia. Modern primer-makers must needs leave confessions behind tnern, as it' they were so many Rousseaus. Our weakest moo-orators think it a hard case if they cannot spout to posterity. Caoin-uoys and drummers are busy with their commentaries de oello Galileo; the John Gilpins of 'the nineteenth century' are the historians of their5 owr: anabaseis; and, thanks to 'the march of intellect,' we are already rich in the autobiography of pickpockets , 4 2 As a matter of fact, "the mania for this garbage of Confessions, and Kecollections, and Reminiscences, and Aniliana"43 was nothing new; it went oack to the eighteenth century.

A large number of the works

recorded by Professor Stauffer In his study of eighteenth-century biography are lives of soldiers of fortune, eccentrics, adventuresses, actresses, and highwaymen; as he observes, "Hanging was the most nearly certain way to immediate biographical fame in the eighteenth century." On the other hand, in an unfavoraole review of four memoirs in Blackwood's In 1829, the critic feels that they presage a recrudescence of the interest excited Dy the life of "the notorious Harriette Wilson" and an end to what "has long been the brilliant condition of autobiography."45 Quarterly reviewer's statements?

How can this be reconciled with the Apparently Blackwood's critic knew

little of the eighteenth-century autooiographical tradition and of 42

Untitled review, 35 (1827), 149.

^°The same, p. 164. 44 Tde Art of Biography in Eighteenth Century England, p. 199. 45 " A u t o o i o g r a p h y , " 26 ( 1 8 2 9 ) , p p . 7 3 7 - 7 3 8 .

27 the recent works castigated in The Quarterly two years previously; he gives no examples of what he considers orllliant.

Perhaps he was

willing so to account what seemed less satisfactory to others, for he conceives it one of the modest functions of autobiography to provide the reader "much of the entertainment of the novel, with the proud satisfaction of seeming to oe engaged with an instructive AC

cook."

These conflicting views on the condition of autobiography

indicate the lack of an established critical outlook and indeed of recognition of the autobiography as a serious literary form.

Auto-

biography was apparently so largely connected with sensational confessions that the Quarterly reviewer doubts the serious possibilities of the genre altogether: Few great men—none of the very highest oroer—have chosen to paint otherwise than indirectly, and through the shadows of ima&inary forms, the secret workings of their own minds; nor is it likely that genius will ever be found altogether divested of this proud modesty, unless in the melancholy case of its being tinged, as in Rousseau, with insanity.47 A literary development in which the proud modesty of writers is matched against the proud satisfaction of readers is not likely to reach full sincerity and intensity.

The Romantic period is impor-

tant, then, for calling attention to the materials and spirit of autooiography rather than for actual achievement, for impressing upon the century the outlook which De Quincey voices in the twilight of Romanticism: ...I contend that much more than amusement ought to settle upon any narrative of a life that is really confidential If a man were able really to pierce the haze which so often envelops, even to himself, his own secret springs of action 46 The same, p. 737. 47 P . 164.

28 and reserve, there cannot oe a life moving at all under intellectual impulses that would not, through that single force of absolute frankness, fall within the reach of a deep, solemn, and sometimes even of a thrilling interest.48 In their reference to the difficulty of self-analysis and the need for intellectual impulses, De Quincey's words suggest a Victorian qualification of Romantic enthusiasm, yet they preserve the Romantic faith in the Importance of the inner life and the value of selfrevelation. 4.

Influences upon Victorian Self-Study

Without attempting any merely genetic explanation of the Victorian development of autooiography, it is possiole to observe certain tendencies which created the Dackground and fostered the impulse for personal records of life-experience.

Five of these may be singled

out for comment: (1) the generally problematic orientation of the age (2) the social and economic evolution of the time (3) the perseverance of the Romantic tradition (4) the dominance of Evangelicalism (5) the diffusion of German thought. At the beginning of the Victorian period thinkers faced the crucial economic and social problems that had arisen chiefly as a result of the Industrial Revolution.

The agitation of the middle

classes for the Reform Bill of 1832 and the agitation of the lower classes against the Poor Law of 1834 show the economic and social ferment which introduced the period.

Less open to observation then,

as it is even yet, was the complete speculative unhinging of many of 48,l

General Preface in lo53," David Masson, eo. (Works, I; London, 1896), pp. 9-10.

the early Victorians.

They realized, at least confusedly, that the

age was demanding not a solution for isolated difficulties, but a new orientation of thought.

Writing in 1832, Carlyle traced the

upheaval of the time oack to the eighteenth century: It was wholly a divided age, that of Johnson; Unity existed nowhere, in its Heaven, or in its Earth. Society, through every fiore, was rent asunder: all things, it was then becoming visible, Out could not then be understood, were moving onwards, with an impulse received ages before, yet now first with a decisive rapidity, towards that great chaotic ^ulf, where, v.nether in the snape of French Revolutions, Reform uills, or whpt shape soever, oloody or bloodless, the descent and en';ulfment assume, we now see then weltering ana uoillng.49 Tne historical method of Giooon, tho psychology of Hartley, and the epistemology of Hume had exercised their erosive effect on the general outlook.

It found expression again in the following year

in the words of Bulwer-Lytton, speaking from the quite different viewpoint of the Byronic dandy turned politician and memoer of Parliament: I have said that we live in an age of visiole transition— an age of disquietude and douDt—of the removal of timeworn landmarks, and the breaking up of the hereditary elements of society—old opinions, feelings—ancestral customs arm institutions are crumoliru away, and both the spiritual and temporal worlds are darkened' oy the shadow of change. The commencement of one of these epochsperiodical In the history of mankind—is hailed oy the sanguine as the cominj. of a new ..illenium—a \reat iconoclastic reformation, by whicn all false goos shall oe overthrown. To me sucn epoens appear but as the dark passages in the appointed progress of mankind — the times of^greatest unhappiness to our species—passages into which we nave no reason to rejoice at our entrance, save from the hope of oeinu sooner landed on the ooposite side. Uncertainty is the greatest of all our evils.* And I know of no happiness where there is not a firm unwavering belief in its duration. "ooswell's Life of Johnson" (v»orks, Centenary Edition, XXVI11; London, [lb9o] ), p. 104.

30 The age then is one of destruction', disguise it as we will, it must oe so characterized; miserable would be our lot were it not also an age for reconstructing."V These indications of feeling in the 1830's suggest the upheaval in thought which was to go on for the next half-century.

It was an

upheaval that came home the more strongly to individuals because of a shell of external fixity in the society in which they lived and the lack of precedent for many of the courses which they felt obliged to take. The intellectual growth of the age served not to relieve but only to deepen the involvement.

The half-realized implications of

eighteenth-century skepticism and materialism were given new force and application by the advance of scientific discovery and of the secularist outlook.

Thinkers after the mid-century faced what 51 Arnold called "the world's multitudinousness" with less and less of fundamental certitude. tion of attrition:

Arnold summed up the results of a genera-

"There is not a creed which is not shaken, not

an accredited dogma which is not shown to De questionable, not a 52 received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve."

With the

underpinnings of life that come from traditional thought and institutions so greatly loosened, it was natural for the individual to assume a new importance.

As H. V. Routh oDserves, "...the true sign

of the times was spiritual isolation, not intellectual fellowship. 5Q

England and the E n g l i s h (2nd e d . , 2 v o l s . ; London, 1 8 3 3 ) , I I , 15G-157. 51 The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Plough, Howard Foster Lowry, ed. (London and New York: Oxford, 1932), p. 97. 52 "The Study of Poetry," Essays in Criticism, Second Series (Works, IV; London: Macmillan, 1903), p. 1.


n: Oxford, 1353). Boswell, James, Life of Johns ,n, G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell, edd. (4 vols.; Oxford: Clarend-n Press, 1334). Browning, Robert, Complete Poetic and Dramatic Works, Horace E. Scuucer, ed. (Cambridge edition; boston and New York, lo95). Bulwer, Edward Lytton, England and the English (2nd ed., 2 vols.; Lorid -n, 1833). Carlyle, Thomas, "Biography," "Boswell1s Life of Johnson," (Works, Centenary Edition ."XXVIII; London, [18..8]). Church, Mary C., Life and Letters of Dean Church (London and New York, 1694). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Biographic Literarla, J. Shawcross, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19"