TB: The idea that if one writes about oneself one's got to write something interesting, is a terrible fallacy. I'm sure we could think of some autobiographical works which aren't very interesting because there wasn't very much interesting going on inside whoever was writing it and he or she didn't have the literary skills to produce it anyway. 

DJ: Isn't this sort of self-revelation also very artificial? Take Goethe, for example: he writes wonderfully about his feelings and yet if we didn't have the conversations recorded by Eckermann, we would hardly know him at all. There was a sort of mask-like front that he put on of the great man of letters which, in its way, is every bit as impenetrable as the great cultural figures of the past, say Shakespeare. 

TB: Goethe does reveal a great deal about himself. After all, he wrote a very long autobiography, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, where you can find out an awful lot about him, and his Italian Journey, both the, so to speak, spruced-up version, which he published subsequently and the raw material from which it came. There is also a great deal about him in his letters. You talked earlier of the emergence of the public, and that had led to a change in the way in which these self-consciously great men and women were regarded because people wanted to know a lot about them. So there was a market out there for everything that Goethe wrote. Also, people wanted to know what he looked like. It is a change of attitude and it doesn't just come from a cultural revolution, there's a social and an economic revolution going on, a revolution in communication, which becomes cumulative. This results in a man like Goethe, who after all, lived for a very long time — he was born in 1749 and didn't die until 1832 — becoming very well known. 

JB: Letters are a very interesting phenomenon because it must be in the Romantic period for the first time that you begin to get artistic figures, well-known figures, writing letters in the knowledge that there was a very good chance that those letters would be leaked or sold to the press. This was a great worry of Byron's. He knew there was a chance that everything he wrote would be sold or stolen and subsequently published. So the distinction between the private and the public sphere collapses there. For someone like Byron, there is no privacy.

TB: You never know how much they are thinking of posterity when they are writing their letters. I can take another archetypal Romantic figure, more Romantic, in fact, than Byron: Wagner. Twelve thousand of his letters have been found, and they are still finding more, and some of them are very long: there's a letter to August Roeckel on The Ring of the Nibelung written in 1854 which runs to 8-9,000 words — characteristically Wagnerian. You just don't know when he sits down to write a letter whether he's thinking, "This could well be finding its way into a collected correspondence one day so I'd better watch what I'm saying."

DJ: That's really my point, that precisely at the moment when self-revelation becomes a virtue in an artist, inevitably it also becomes immediately stylised. So in European culture in general, and German culture in particular, the idea of Wagner was for a very long time a fake one. He's presented as the composer as hero, in the Carlyle sense. The true Wagner was a much more complex and in many ways a much more unpleasant man, but that side of him was not generally known until much later — except by those who knew him, Nietzsche perhaps.

TB: There were plenty of people to say that he was a very nasty piece of work during his lifetime just in the same way as there were plenty to say that he was absolutely wonderful. Wagner is that kind of person, who divided his contemporaries at the time and continues to divide people today. He's just a personality so strong that he inevitably has that kind of effect.