Melancholy and Literary Biography, 1640-1816

J. Darcy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137271099
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book traces the development of literary biography in the eighteenth century; how writers' melancholy was probed to explore the inner life. Case studies of a number of significant authors reveal the 1790s as a time of biographical experimentation. Reaction against philosophical biography led to a nineteenth-century taste for romanticized lives.

Part I

Johnson, Melancholy and Early Literary Biography 1640–1791

1

Early Literary Biographies: Walton’s Donne to Sprat’s Cowley

Dr Johnson was famously a lover of biography. Yet in 1773 Boswell noted, ‘He did not think that the life of any literary man in England had been well written’ (Boswell, Life, v. 240). The first half of this book looks at what literary biographies Johnson was likely to be thinking of, and asks why he might have been critical of this branch of the genre. It also considers the place accorded in such writing to melancholy – the name frequently given to the most profound suffering. The first chapter explores the emergence of literary biography in the seventeenth century, arguing that the label of melancholy is nearly always a pejorative one, and that it is only religious melancholics who are accorded respect. This will increasingly come to seem ironic, when both medical and theological discourse seek to discard the term ‘religious melancholy’ from the later eighteenth century onwards.

This chapter focuses on three significant biographies: Izaak Walton’s lives of Donne and Herbert and Thomas Sprat’s life of the poet Abraham Cowley. In seeking to analyse portrayals of individual melancholy, it considers the biographical presentation of the inner, private or hidden life. Tropes of dress and undress, public and private spaces, and of portraiture offer insights into such presentations, as well as contributing to an emerging discourse of biographical methodology. This chapter will therefore examine ways in which Plutarch’s theory and practice of biography continued to have an important influence on biographical writing throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in particular in the first extended discussion of the genre by Dryden in his Life of Plutarch. It is therefore with Plutarch that we will begin.

The Influence of Plutarch

Nearly all the enduring issues in the writing of literary biography – about the primacy of uncovering a person’s hidden motivation, and the value of anecdote as a tool to achieve this – have their roots in classical biographical writing of Plutarch. An important legacy from Plutarch is his insistence that ‘it is not so much histories that we are writing but lives’.¹ But it was not until the eighteenth century that a new interest developed in the ordinary life. Johnson, who himself had hoped to publish an edition of Plutarch, as well as at least two group biographies ‘in imitation of Plutarch’,² famously articulated the value of such biography in Rambler 60: ‘there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful’ (320). The particular problem often expressed by eighteenth-century literary biographers was the potentially uneventful nature of the lives of writers as opposed to warriors (although Johnson’s Life of Savage would surely have been evidence to the contrary). However, Johnson shares with Plutarch a belief that biography’s fundamental endeavour should be the revelation of underlying character. For Johnson, as for his classical predecessors, this endeavour served the great moral purpose of biography: the illustration of the workings of virtue and vice to serve as inspiration and guidance to the reader.

Plutarch had argued for the ethical purpose of reading the life of a virtuous man: ‘virtue immediately so disposes one towards actions that at the same time one admires the works and emulates those who worked them’.³ Correspondingly, he argued, the biographer has a moral duty to portray vice, where it exists, to instruct the reader to ‘flee and evade’ its manifestations. The emphasis here is on the refining of one’s moral judgement. It is not enough merely to contemplate the ‘fine, just and useful things alone’ but also the ‘harmful, shameful and unjust things’. Innocence of evil, in this formulation, is ‘silliness and ignorance’.⁴ Plutarch’s clear ethos, however, offered no guidelines to the questions that became central to biography. Firstly, in writing the life of a contemporary or near contemporary, should personal failings be discussed, and if so, to what ends? This question later overlapped with one of increasing urgency in literary biography: how much should a biographer reveal of a subject’s private life (a term that will need fuller discussion)? Izaak Walton charmed his readers by his particular style of panegyric: his lives of Donne and Herbert and others were offered as aids to devotion.⁵ Johnson, on the other hand, while admiring Walton’s work, would argue vehemently against panegyric in general. Yet he remained alert to the consequences of publishing the faults of a recently deceased contemporary, whose family and friends might be needlessly offended. This is indeed where the debate comes into much sharper focus. With the increasing demand for such biographies in the later eighteenth century, such sensitivities had to be balanced against both the ideal of biographical truth, and, of course, less altruistic commercial interests. Interestingly, it is here that biographers as different as Boswell and Hayley invoke classical topoi of funeral urns and ‘still-warm ashes’ as coercive devices to pre-empt readerly curiosity about issues the biographers consider should remain hidden.

Two further important questions for biography were, firstly, how can a biographer discern the truth about an individual’s vice and virtues? And secondly, what authority can the biographer appeal to in making this judgement? Plutarch famously addresses the first question when he champions the importance of small details in revealing underlying character: ‘… there is not always in the most outstanding deeds a revelation of virtue or vice, but often a little matter like a saying or a joke hints at character more than battles where thousands die, huge troop deployments, or the sieges of cities.’⁶ Johnson’s well-known statement that ‘more knowledge may be made of a man’s real character by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative’ (Rambler 60, 322) tacitly endorses Plutarch’s, and lightly suggests a further aspect of it: a biographer needs to authenticate the judgement made from revealing details by consulting someone who knew his subject as a private man.

An important and troubling term in biographical discourse is ‘soul’. Plutarch uses it in talking of the need to focus on hidden depths, comparing a biographer to a portrait painter:

So, just as painters get likenesses from the face and appearance of the eyes, by which character is hinted at, paying very little attention to the other parts of the body, so we must be allowed to penetrate rather the signs of the soul, and through these to shape the life of the man, leaving others the magnitudes and battles.⁷

A passage from Dionysius of Halicarnassus can help us understand what Plutarch means by ‘the signs of the soul’:

What is this quality? Concerning each and every deed not only to see and to tell what is obvious to the majority, but to examine also the hidden motivations of the actions and of their agents and the passions in their souls – things which it is not easy for the majority to discern – and to reveal all the mysteries of apparent virtue and undetected vice.⁸

This definition suggests that for biographical purposes at least, the soul is the seat of hidden forces that may show themselves in outward actions – ‘passions’ denoting overpowering emotions – or may remain concealed. If, in discussing biography today, we describe this interest as ‘psychological’, we should remind ourselves that important aspects of our modern meaning of the term – in particular, ideas about un- or subconscious drives – would not have been available in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The word itself, however, is given by the OED as first appearing in 1654: in Nicholas Culper writing ‘Psychologie is the knowledg of the Soul’.

For the word ‘soul’ itself, the main definitions given by the OED which were current in the seventeenth century are: ‘the principle of life’, ‘the principle of thought and action’, ‘the seat of the emotions’, ‘intellectual and spiritual power’ as well as ‘the spiritual part of man considered in its moral aspects or in relation to God and His precepts’. The idea of the soul as the immortal, spiritual part of man is, of course, central to hagiography as it is to spiritual autobiography. Indeed most of the significant non-hagiographical biographies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are framed in theological terms. But for the purposes of our discussion, when I describe early modern and Georgian biography’s enduring concern with ‘the psychological’, I intend by this the Plutarchan interest in hidden desires and motivations. It is further predicated on a model of selfhood as an unchanging inner essence. And as I hope to demonstrate further on, this theme of the inner nature is often most penetratingly explored through biographical considerations of melancholy.

Dryden’s Life of Plutarch, to which we shall shortly turn, makes the point that focus on biography often overlooks the figure of the biographer. It is therefore worth noting Plutarch’s sheer enjoyment of biographical writing: ‘It befell me to begin writing the Lives for the sake of others, but now continue it and enjoy my stay for my own sake … What happens is like spending time together and living together.’⁹ But Roger Lonsdale’s magisterial account of Johnson’s composition of the Lives of the Poets shows that the writing of them was far from undiluted pleasure. As befits his understanding of taste, Johnson is silent about his own emotional response to the encounter between himself and his biographical subject. Yet we know he strongly believes in the centrality of the close emotional identification of the reader of biography to the subject. Rambler 60 begins with his insistence that the moral power of biography lies in its producing ‘an act of the imagination … placing us, for a time, in the condition of him whose fortune we contemplate; so that we feel … what ever motions would be excited by the same good or evil happening to ourselves’ (318–19). By implication, therefore, the biographer has to have experienced that ‘act of the imagination’ in order to make it believable to others. Lonsdale unearths a choice retort of Johnson to Goldsmith that demonstrates both the need for a biographer to have superior psychological insight and Johnson’s sharp rejection of any overly familiar intimacy from a would-be biographer: ‘When Goldsmith suggested that the members of the Literary Club had “travelled over one another’s minds”, he retorted: “Sir, you have not travelled over my mind, I promise you”’ (Boswell, Life, iv. 183).¹⁰

We will bear in mind both Plutarch’s idea of the biographer’s informal intimacy with his subject, and Johnson’s clearly boundaried approach when we look later in the book at some distinctly varied attitudes in the biographies of my case studies.

Dryden’s Life of Plutarch (1683)

Plutarch’s various comments on biography in his Lives therefore form the bedrock of a discourse of biographical methodology which emerges slowly from the end of the seventeenth century. Dryden’s Life of Plutarch, prefaced to Plutarch’s Lives (1683) is of particular interest in this respect. It is a work which has received little critical attention to date.¹¹ Starved of biographical information, Dryden uses his engaging essay to consider the theory of biographical writing. His insistence that biography should explore the inner nature of the subject and make use of quotidian detail pre-dates Johnson’s Rambler essay on biography by several decades.¹²

Dryden begins by questioning why, given the interest in history, there is so little written about history writers: ‘as if they were born only for the publick, and had no interest in their own well-being, but were to be lighted up like Tapers, and to waste themselves, for the benefit of others’ (Dryden, 2). He admits to his difficulty in finding factual information about Plutarch’s life, and thus has been ‘forc’d to glean from Plutarch, what he has scatter’d in his writings’ (3). Later he discusses his methodology with equal candour: ‘I pretend not to an exactness of method in this Life, which I am forc’d to collect by patches from several Authors’ (46–7). As we will see Walton doing, Dryden writes the reader into his text, imagining us creating the very text before he has set it down in writing: ‘a quick Reader will be before hand with me, and imagine faster than I can write’ (80).

One of the most familiar tropes of life writing is the biography as the portrait. Related to this are tropes of dress and undress, and of private and public spaces. Where Thomas Sprat in 1668 insisted that familiar letters had no place in biography, because in such letters we saw ‘the soul undress’d’, Dryden argues that it is exactly this state of undress – even nakedness – that biography should reveal. Comparing biographical writing with that of history, Dryden isolates the particular feature that gives biography its particular interest:

there is withal, a descent into minute circumstances, and trivial passages of life, which are natural to this way of writing, and which the dignity of the other two will not admit. There you are conducted only into the rooms of state; here you are led into the private Lodgings of the Heroe: you see him in undress, and are made Familiar with his most private actions and conversations. You may behold a Scipio and a Lelius gathering Cockle-shells on the shore, Augustus playing at bounding stones with Boyes; and Agesilaus riding on a Hobby-horse among his children. The Pageantry of Life is taken away; you see the poor reasonable Animal, as naked as ever nature made him; you are acquainted with his passion and his follies, and find the Demy-God a Man. (94)

The more abstract metaphor of man as a naked ‘Animal’ sits od...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Johnson, Melancholy and Early Literary Biography 1640–1791
• Part II Melancholy and Biographical Experimentation around 1800
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index