AUTOBIOGRAPHY, the life of a person written by him self. The first famous autobiography in European literature is the Confessions of St. Augustine (q.v.), written to show how he discovered the truth of the Catholic religion. For many centuries it remained alone as a document of first-hand and first-rate psy chological importance. Until the 19th century it never had any serious rival in its own kind, with the possible exception of John Bunyan's Grace Abounding; for other great religious confessions have been either in the form of journals (George Fox's, John Wesley's) or must be gathered from correspondence (St. There sa's) or treatises ( Juliana of Norwich, Richard Rolle, San Juan de la Cruz). The autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini is as re markable in its way as St. Augustine's. In it the spirit and colour of the Italian Renaissance, as exhibited in the life of that tur bulent and exquisite craftsman, are preserved for us with aston ishing liveliness; with Burchard's Diaries and Vasari's Lives Cel lini's book reveals to us the spirit and the manners of a whole society. Although Rousseau's Confessions were published earlier, the next great autobiography is also that of an Italian, the Vene tian called Giovanni Jacopo Casanova de Seingalt (see CASA NOVA). The authenticity of his shameless and fascinating book is now generally admitted ; that he lied occasionally is indisput able, but his memoirs on the whole are probably as accurate as they are sordid. It is unfortunate—and no one's fault but Casa nova's—that attention has been fixed on only one aspect of his astonishing vitality. Love-affairs occur in his book as regularly as meals, and are described with even greater particularity; but there is much else : fighting, preaching, talking, pedantry, learn ing, sightseeing, social pleasures, the theatre, the ball-room, the salon and the studio ; to none of these was he a stranger, and in most of them he was an expert. Casanova is the first autobiog rapher who told all he could, and much that he should not : it was his misfortune that he had not more to tell.
It is largely to Rousseau (q.v.) that we owe the multitude of subsequent autobiographies. To an age that had forgotten Au gustine and did not know Casanova (whose work was not pub lished till 1826), Rousseau's Confessions (1782) was a new rev elation. Gibbon's Memoirs must not be forgotten ; but Gibbon was a philosophic historian, not a psychologist. Rousseau was a man whose interest was entirely in his own mind, heart and soul; he chronicles events only as they serve his psychological pur pose. His book not only set up a new standard of autobiography, it gave future autobiographers fresh powers of self-examination. No autobiography written after Rousseau's, except the gigantic narrative of Alexandre Dumas Pere, is free from his influence ; there is none that would not have been written differently if his story of himself had never been given to the world ; for Rous seau is a man divorced from authority, and he approaches himself not as a creature of God but as an independent being. His book is the starting-line of modern psychology.
A mere list of the autobiographies produced since Rousseau fills pages in any library catalogue; and we can only indicate the vast difference between such an autobiography as Col. Hutchin son's in the 17th century and, say, Benjamin Haydon's in the early part of the 19th. The tendency, as old as Dante's Vita Nuova, for the poet to write autobiographically, extends from poetry to fiction, until we meet among the stories of George Sand a novel of almost pure autobiography. One author, George Moore (1852-1933), reversed George Sand's method and turned autobiography into a kind of fiction ; while an American man of letters, William Ellery Leonard, has written a sonnet sequence on a tragic marriage (Two Lives) and a long psycho-analytical record of his life (The Locomotive God). This is of interest as the earliest sustained effort to combine autobiography and psycho-analysis. Since Rousseau many men of letters and of affairs have attempted the autobiography. Among the most dis tinguished are Berlioz, Benjamin Franklin, Sir Walter Scott, Tol stoi, Dostoievski, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, John Rus kin, John Henry Newman, Alexander Herzen, Marie Bashkirt sev, Peter Kropotkin, Frances Anne Kemble and Henry Adams.
(R. E. R.)