THE "TRUTH"
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bring those things out into the open in their respective autobiographies.
Even that great "truth-teller" Rousseau who opens the
Confessions
with,
"I
am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent,
and which will never find an imitator.
I
desire to set before my fellows
the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that man myself,"
could not bring himself to mention the four, or possibly five, children
that he had by Therese Ie Vasseur. These four or five bits of humanity
simply disappear from history, probably into a foundling home, but the
memory of them darkened his last years, perhaps to the point of insanity.
They are not even mentioned in the
Confessions.
The first irony then of
reconstructing a personality is that more often than not the subject
himself is the most unreliable witness, not only about the intangibles
such as his own nature, but about the facts themselves.
Biography fares better, but not too much better. The first com–
plete and seminal "character" in our civilization is Socrates. But he
is known chiefly through the "Apology," which may well be an ideali–
zation. The sketches of Aristophanes, where Socrates is a comic
butt, and of Xenophon, where he is presented as a rather prosaic
person, are both quite dissimilar from the great figure of Plato's
imagination. Again in the character sketch by Diogenes Laertius (circa
A.D. 200), which drew upon past biographies of Socrates, all of
which have disappeared, Socrates emerges as a kind of crank, funny
but no teacher of mankind.
It
is true that the only known fact
about Socrates was the fact that he was put to death by the state
in 399 B.C. Everything else is conjecture. The truth of Socrates is
lost in antiquity, but even when the record of an individual is more
or less extensive, the truth is still elusive. Ancient biography, as in
Plutarch, tended to be honest but incomplete for anyone who has
read Boswell, while modern biography-meaning post-Boswellian bio–
graphy-tends to be up through the nineteenth century complete
in most respects but dishonest, or better, secretive about certain areas.
Boswell's Johnson is the first monumental biography in our civiliza–
tion, but while this is an extensive treatment of a personality, it is
not a complete one. Most of Johnson's youth is obscure; his rela–
tionship to his wife, Hetty, is shrouded; whole aspects of his !being
do not appear. Lockhart's Scott and Forster's Dickens are admitted
whitewashes. Morley's Gladstone is monumental but treats its sub–
ject, understandably, as if it were in fact a monument.
Even when great public figures, like Washington or Lincoln, are
examined exhaustively, we still do not know what they looked like
