Von Georg Misch. ErsterBand: Das Altertum. Leipzig und Berlin: B. G. Teubner. 1907.1
This considerable volume is only one of three which shall contain a comprehensive history of autobiography. The work was undertaken in response to an offer of a prize for such a history, made through the Prussian Academy of the Sciences in 1900 (“Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften,” 1900, p. 55). Two manuscripts were presented—the one written more from the point of view of purely literary history (a history, therefore, of autobiographies), the other from a more philosophicosocial standpoint (a history, therefore, more of autobiography). The prize fell to the latter (“Sitzungsberichte,” etc., 1905, p. 686); and it is this treatise, the first part of which now lies before us. Although only a fragment of the whole work, this first part has nevertheless a completeness of its own. It gives us the entire history of autobiography in the old world. It has indeed a higher claim to unity than this merely external fact may suggest. For the history of autobiography in the old world is not merely the history of the inception and development of autobiographical writing through a definitely marked literary period. It is the history of the growth of this literary form from its first tentative beginnings to its culmination; for this literary form reached its culmination as the old world was passing away. We can say even more than that. Both as a purely literary mode and as the expression of individuality autobiography attained its climax in a single work, which came into existence just as the old world was dying. The history of autobiography in antiquity may almost be read, therefore, as the history of the production of a single great work—the long preparation for it, ending in the finished product. And this is really the ground of our deepest interest in this history. For this one great work into which all these lines of preparation, so carefully traced by Dr. Misch, issue, is Augustine’s “Confessions.” The history of autobiography in antiquity may be looked at, then, as at bottom only an orderly study, in a genetic way, of Augustine’s “Confessions.” All that goes before them but leads slowly up the long slope to these heights. All that comes after rests in their shadow.
No one who reads Dr. Misch’s detailed study of the origin and development not merely of autobiographical forms, but of autobiographical life-expression, will fail to feel this. Dr. Misch feels it himself, and from the beginning of his work keeps his readers’ eyes set on the “Confessions” as the goal to which all tends. He is eager that it shall not be inferred from the circumstance that complete autobiographies in the strict sense scarcely attract attention in the Græco-Roman literature until the time of Augustine, that they were a new invention of that age. In point of fact, he insists, the bases for all the autobiographical developments of this age were laid in antiquity, “and Augustine’s work is not a beginning but a completion” (p. 9). It is a part—a very large part—of his task to trace out the lines of development through which autobiography thus slowly came to its rights. He begins at the beginning, by pointing out the autobiographical form which is taken in the Assyrio-Babylonian and Egyptian inscriptions. He fully recognizes, however, that the creation of true autobiography depends on the development of personality and the individualistic habit of looking at things. This he finds to have arisen first on Greek soil and to have received its first impulse from the introspection fostered by the Socratic self-consciousness, reinforcing our natural need of self-expression and desire to be understood—not to say to be admired. Nevertheless autobiographical writing was slow in working out its inevitable destiny. Throughout the whole period of Greek culture up to the birth of Christ, it held only a very secondary place in literature. Only in the one species of political autobiography have we anything like a complete series of works of this order either preserved or witnessed to us. Beyond this, the cultivation of this literary form was in the hands of the rhetoricians, and it was from this subordinate region of life that the first Greek autobiography worthy of its name—the so-called “Antidosis” of Isocrates—has come down to us (b.c. 353). In this artificial defense of himself against an imaginary opponent, the rhetorician, in full consciousness of the novelty of his task, undertook, for the benefit of the ill-informed and of future generations, to depict his own character, his course of life, and his training: to make known the truth concerning himself, and to set out “an image of his mind and of his whole life”; fondly hoping thus “to leave behind him a monument to himself more lasting than statues of brass.” The example thus set by Isocrates was not, however, at once widely followed. At least there have come down to us, for the space of some three hundred years, outside of the steady succession of political autobiographies from Alexander down, little or no traces of autobiographical writing. After the time of Cicero, however, the stream began to flow with gradually increasing fullness, and by the second century after Christ we find ourselves in the presence of an astonishing variety of autobiographical forms. Here side by side appear Hadrian’s “Vita,” Galen’s treatises on his own books, Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditationes,” the romance of Apuleius with its autobiographical conclusion, the “sacred orations” of Ælius Aristides, the subject of which is his daily communion in his sickness with the deity, the visions of the martyr Perpetua and numerous Hellenizing histories of conversion like those of Justin and Cyprian.