tied up with red tape, like teachers, soldiers and sailors, or unduly
dependent upon other men, like legislators, and like clerics in those
churches which are strong enough to control the insubordinations of
the pulpit. Of all these classes, legislators are the worst off,
because their dependence is the most ignoble and disastrous. So long
as a future election is the controlling influence in their lives, they
have no alternative but to truckle to any compact body of voters that
bullies them into subjection. So long as they take for their slogan,
“We aim to please,” they must pay out their manhood for the privilege
of pleasing. In 1923 Senator Borah charged Congress with “organized
cowardice” in the matter of the soldiers’ bonus. It was a borrowed
phrase neatly refitted. The spectacle of a body of lawmakers doubling
and turning like a hare in its efforts to satisfy the servicemen
without annoying the taxpayer struck the Senator--and others--as the
kind of exaggerated subjection which paves the way to anarchy.
Timidity was as alien to the soul of Henry Adams as it is alien to the
soul of Admiral Sims. He was not a man who skirted the hard places on
the road, or who was so busy keeping both feet on the ground that he
feared to take a step. But he was conscious of the inquisitorial spirit
which is part of the righteousness of America, and which keeps watch
and ward over all the schooling of the country. “Education,” he wrote,
“like politics, is a rough affair, and every instructor has to shut his
eyes and hold his tongue as though he were a priest.”
The policy of shutting one’s eyes and holding one’s tongue is highly
esteemed in all professions, and in all departments of public service.
The man who can hear black called white without fussily suggesting that
perhaps it is only grey; the man who evades responsibility, and eschews
inside criticism (like the criticism of a battleship by an admiral);
the man who never tells an unpalatable truth “at the wrong time” (the
right time has yet to be discovered), is the man whose success in life
is fairly well assured. There is an optimism which nobly anticipates
the eventual triumph of great moral laws, and there is an optimism
which cheerfully tolerates unworthiness. The first belongs to brave and
lonely men; the second is the endearing quality of men whose sagging
energy and cautious content can be trusted to make no trouble for their
kind.
The plain-speaking of soldiers and sailors is reprobated and punished,
but their discretion is less conspicuously rewarded. They are expected
to be undeviatingly brave in the field and at sea; but timorous and
heedful when not engaged in fighting their country’s enemies. They
are at a disadvantage in times of peace, strait-jacketed by rules and
regulations, regarded with suspicion by sociologists, with hostility by
pacifists, with jealousy by politicians. A grateful Republic dismisses
the men who fought for her, and cherishes her army of office-holders.
When General Wood and Admiral Sims spoke some unpleasant truths, nobody
ventured to call these truths lies; but everybody said that General
Wood and Admiral Sims were not the proper persons to speak them. As the
proper persons to speak them never would have spoken them, the country
would have been spared the discomfort of listening, and the “common
quiet,” which is mankind’s concern, would have been undisturbed.
So far, then, is Mr. Harold Stearns right in accusing us as a nation
of timidity. So far, then, is Mrs. Gerould right in accusing us of
exaggerated prudence. That something akin to timidity has crept into
the hearts of Englishmen, who are fortified by a long tradition of
freedom and common sense, is evidenced by the title given to two
recent volumes of scholarly, and by no means revolutionary, papers,
“Outspoken Essays.” Frankness must be at a discount when it becomes
self-conscious, and constitutes a claim to regard. The early essayists
were fairly outspoken without calling anybody’s attention to the fact.
The contributors to those great and grim “Reviews” which so long held
the public ear were outspoken to the verge of brutality. A comfortless
candour was their long suit. Never before in the history of English
letters has this quality been so rare as to be formally adopted and
proclaimed.
Santayana, analyzing the essentials of independence, comes to the
discouraging conclusion that liberty of speech and liberty to elect our
lawmakers do not materially help us to live after our own minds. This
he holds to be the only positive and worthwhile form of freedom. He
aims high. Very few of us can live after our own minds, because the
tyranny of opinion is reënforced by the tyranny of circumstance. But
none of us can hope to live after our own minds unless we are free to
speak our own minds; to speak them, not only in the company of friends
(which is all Mrs. Gerould grants us), but openly in the market-place;
and not with a blast of defiance, but calmly as in the exercise of an
unquestioned prerogative. Under no other circumstance is it possible to
say anything of value or of distinction. Under no other circumstance
can we enjoy the luxury of self-respect. There is an occasional
affectation of courage and candour on the part of those who know they
are striking a popular note; but to dare to be unpopular, “in the best
and noblest sense of a good and noble word,” is to hold fast to the
principles which speeded the Mayflower to Plymouth Rock, and Penn to
the shores of the Delaware.
The Happiness of Writing an Autobiography
Mr. Edmund Gosse, commenting on the lack of literary curiosity in
the early years of the seventeenth century, ascribes it to a growing
desire for real knowledge, to an increasing seriousness of mind. Men
read travels, history, philosophy, theology. “There were interesting
people to be met with, but there were no Boswells. Sir Aston Cokayne
mentions that he knew all the men of his time, and could have written
their lives, had it been worth his while. Instead of doing this, the
exasperating creature wrote bad epigrams and dreary tragi-comedies.”
A century later, when literary curiosity had in some measure revived,
Sir Walter Scott, losing his temper over Richard Cumberland’s
“Memoirs,” wrote of their author in the “Quarterly Review”: “He has
pandered to the public lust for personal anecdote by publishing his own
life, and the private history of his acquaintances.”
A better illustration of La Fontaine’s wisest fable, “The Miller, his
Son, and the Ass,” could not anywhere be found. The only way to please
everybody is to have no ass; that is, to print nothing, and leave the
world at peace. But as authorship is a trade by which men seek to live,
they must in some way get their beast to market, and be criticized
accordingly.
It is probable that the increasing vogue of biography, the amazing
output of books about men and women of meagre attainments and
flickering celebrity, sets the modern autobiographer at work.
“For now the dentist cannot die,
And leave his forceps as of old,
But round him, ere his clay be cold,
Is spun the vast biography.”
The astute dentist says very sensibly: “If there is any money to be
made out of me, why not make it myself? If there is any gossip to be
told about me, why not tell it myself? If modesty restrains me from
praising myself as highly as I should expect a biographer to praise me,
prudence dictates the ignoring of circumstances which an indiscreet
biographer might drag into the light. I am, to say the least, as
safe in my own hands as I should be in anybody else’s; and I shall,
moreover, enjoy the pleasure dearest to the heart of man, the pleasure
of talking about myself in the terms that suit me best.”
Perhaps it is this open-hearted enjoyment which communicates itself to
the reader, if he has a generous disposition, and likes to see other
people have a good time. Even the titles of certain autobiographical
works are saturated with self-appreciation. We can see the august
simper with which a great lady in the days of Charles the Second
headed her manuscript: “A True Relation of the Birth, Breeding and Life
of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Written by Herself.” Mr.
Theodore Dreiser’s “A Book About Myself” sounds like nothing but a loud
human purr. The intimate wording of “Margot Asquith, An Autobiography,”
gives the key to all the cheerful confidences that follow. Never before
or since has any book been so much relished by its author. She makes
no foolish pretence of concealing the pleasure that it gives her; but
passes on with radiant satisfaction from episode to episode, extracting
from each in turn its full and flattering significance. The volumes are
as devoid of revelations as of reticence. If at times they resemble the
dance of the seven veils, the reader is invariably reassured when the
last veil has been whisked aside, and he sees there is nothing behind
it.
The happiness of writing an autobiography which is going to be
published and read is a simple and comprehensible emotion. Before books
were invented, men carved on stone something of a vainglorious nature
about themselves, and expected their subjects, or their neighbours,
to decipher it. But there is a deeper and subtler gratification in
writing an autobiography which seeks no immediate public, and contents
itself with the expression of a profound and indulged egotism. Marie
Bashkirtseff has been reproached for making the world her father
confessor; but the reproach seems hardly justified in view of the fact
that the “Journal,” although “meant to be read,” was never thrust by
its author upon readers, and was not published until six years after
her death. She was, although barely out of girlhood, as complex as
Mrs. Asquith is simple and robust. She possessed, moreover, genuine
intellectual and artistic gifts. The immensity of her self-love and
self-pity (she could be more sorry for her own troubles than anybody
who ever lived) steeped her pages in an ignoble emotionalism. She was
often unhappy; but she revelled in her unhappiness, and summoned the
Almighty to give it his serious attention. Her overmastering interest
in herself made writing about herself a secret and passionate delight.
There must always be a different standard for the confessions which,
like Rousseau’s, are made voluntarily to the world, and the confessions
which, like Mr. Pepys’s, are disinterred by the world from the caches
where the confessants concealed them. Not content with writing in a
cipher, which must have been a deal of trouble, the great diarist
confided his most shameless passages to the additional cover of
Spanish, French, Greek and Latin, thus piquing the curiosity of
a public which likes nothing better than to penetrate secrets and
rifle tombs. He had been dead one hundred and twenty-two years before
the first part of his diary was printed. Fifty years later, it was
considerably enlarged. One hundred and ninety years after the garrulous
Secretary of the Admiralty had passed into the eternal silences,
the record of his life (of that portion of it which he deemed worth
recording) was given unreservedly to English readers. The “Diary” is
what it is because of the manner of the writing. Mr. Lang says that of
all who have gossiped about themselves, Pepys alone tells the truth.
Naturally. If one does not tell the truth in a Greek cipher, when shall
the truth be told?
The severe strictures passed by George Eliot upon autobiographies
are directed against scandal-mongering no less than against personal
outpourings. She could have had the English-speaking world for a
confidant had she consented to confide to it; but nothing was less to
her liking. She objected to “volunteered and picked confessions,” as in
their nature insincere, and also as conveying, directly or indirectly,
accusations against others. Her natural impulse was to veil her own
soul--which was often sick and sore--from scrutiny; and, being a person
of limited sympathies, she begrudged her neighbour the privilege of
exhibiting his soul, sores and all, to the public. The struggle of
human nature “to bury its lowest faculties,” over which she cast
unbroken silence, is what the egotist wants to reveal, and the public
wants to observe. When Nietzsche says debonairly of himself, “I have
had no experience of religious difficulties, and have never known what
it was to feel sinful,” the statement, though probably untrue, creates
at once an atmosphere of flatness. It is what Walt Whitman ardently
admired in beasts--
“They do not lie awake in the dark, and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.”
Next to the pleasure of writing lovingly about ourselves--but not
comparable to it--is the pleasure of writing unlovingly about our
fellows. Next to the joy of the egotist is the joy of the detractor.
I think that the last years of Saint-Simon, those sad impoverished
years when he lived forgotten by his world, must have been tremendously
cheered by the certainty that, sooner or later, the public would read
his memoirs. Nobody knows with what patient labour, and from what
devious sources he collected his material; but we can all divine the
secret zest with which he penned his brilliant, malicious, sympathetic,
truth-telling pages. Thirty years after his death some of these pages
crept cautiously into print; but a full hundred years had passed
before the whole text was given to the world. Perhaps the dying
French gentleman anticipated no earlier resurrection for his buried
manuscript; but he knew his nation and he knew his work. The nation and
the work were bound to meet.
A somewhat similar satisfaction must have stolen into the heart of
Charles Greville when he wrote the last pages of his diary, and laid
it aside for future publication. Nineteenth-century England presented
none of the restrictions common to eighteenth-century France; and ten
years after Greville’s death the first instalment of the ever-famous
“Memoirs” exploded like a bomb in the serried ranks of British official
and fashionable life. It shook, not the security, but the complacency
of the Queen on her throne. It was an intelligent and impartial picture
of the times; and there is nothing that people like less than to be
intelligently and impartially described. Moreover, the writer was no
anonymous critic whose words came unweighted by authority, no mere man
of letters whom men of affairs could ignore. He had lived in the heart
of administrative England, and he knew whereof he spoke.
Lord Hervey’s memoirs are not autobiographical at all: they are
historical, like the memoirs of Sully, and Jean de Joinville, and
Philippe de Comines. They are very properly entitled “Memoirs of the
Reign of George the Second,” and what their author did not know about
that interesting reign (as seen from the angle of the Court) was not
worth the knowing. Historians have made free use of his material; and
some of those to whom it has been most valuable, like Thackeray, have
harshly depreciated the chronicler. Dr. Jowett, in a moment of cynical
misgiving, said that every amusing story must of necessity be unkind,
untrue, or immoral. Hervey’s stories are not untrue, and not often
immoral; but they _are_ unkind. What did he see about him of which he
could consistently write with kindness? His sharpest thrusts have a
careless quality which redeems them from the charge of vindictiveness.
When he says of Frederick, Prince of Wales, “He was as false as his
capacity would allow him to be,” it sounds like an observation passed
with casual unconcern upon a natural phenomenon which had chanced to
come under his notice.
Sully was a maker of history as well as a writer of history. He had
no taste and no time for self-analysis, and, like Joinville, he had
the rare good fortune to serve a master whom he sincerely loved and
admired. Comines also admired his master, but he did not love him.
Nobody has yet been put on record as loving Louis the Eleventh. All
these men wrote with candour and acumen. No pleasure which they can
have taken in compiling their memoirs can equal, or even approach, the
pleasure with which we read them. Their accuracy is the accuracy of the
observer, not of the antiquarian. “In my opinion,” writes Comines, “you
who lived in the age when these affairs were transacted have no need to
be informed of the exact hours when everything was done.” “I now make
known to my readers,” observes Joinville composedly, “that all they
shall find in this book which I have declared I have seen and known, is
true, and what they ought most firmly to believe. As for such things as
I have mentioned as hearsay, they may understand them as they please.”
These excursions into the diversified region of the memoir lead us
away from the straight and narrow path of the autobiography. These
saunterings along the pleasant byways of history distract us from
the consideration of the human soul, as shown us by its too ecstatic
possessor. We know as much as we need to know about the souls of Lord
Hervey, and Sully, and of the Sire de Joinville, which was really a
beautiful article; but we know a great deal more about the souls of
George the Second, and Henry of Navarre, and of Saint Louis, shining
starlike through the centuries. What we gain is better worth having
than what we lose.
When we read the true autobiography, as that of Benvenuto Cellini, we
see the august men of the period assume a secondary place, a shadowy
significance. They patronize the artist or imprison him, according to
their bent. They give him purses of five hundred ducats when they are
complacent, and they banish him from their very limited domains when
he kills somebody whom they prefer to keep alive. But not for one
moment is our attention distracted from the narrator himself to these
rude arbiters of fate. He makes it plain to us from the start that he
is penning his autobiography in a spirit of composed enjoyment, and
because he deems it “incumbent upon upright men who have performed
anything noble or praiseworthy to record with their own hand the events
of their lives.” He tells us in detail how it pleased God that he
should come into the world; and he tells us of all that he has done
to make God’s action in the matter a source of regret, as well as of
satisfaction, to others. Those true words of Frederick the Great,
“On peut apprendre de bonnes choses d’un scélérat,” are singularly
applicable to this particular rascal. It is as difficult to find
standards by which to appraise his worth as it is to find rules by
which to test his accuracy. Just as it has been said of Rousseau, that
even in the very ecstasy of truth-telling he does not tell the truth,
so it may be said of Cellini, that even in the very ecstasy of lying he
does not wholly lie.
It is characteristic of a simpler age than the one we live in now
that autobiographers sang their own praises candidly and lustily.
Cellini puts graceful eulogies of himself into the mouths of his
contemporaries, which is one way, and a very good way, of getting them
said. The Duchesse de Montpensier (La Grande Mademoiselle) goes a step
further, and assures us that the Creator is sympathetically aware of
her merits and importance. “I may say without vanity that just Heaven
would not bestow such a woman as I am upon a man who was unworthy of
her.” Wilhelmina, Margravine of Baireuth, and sister of Frederick the
Great, writes with composure: “Happily my good disposition was stronger
than the bad example of my governess”; and, as the testimony of the
governess was not taken, Wilhelmina’s carries the day.
This directness contrasts pleasantly with the more involved, and
possibly more judicious, methods employed by memoir-writers like
Richard Lovell Edgeworth, father of the immortal Maria, and by
autobiographers like Harriet Martineau. Mr. Edgeworth, recounting his
first experience of married life, says with conscious nobility: “I felt
the inconvenience of an early and hasty marriage; and though I heartily
repented of my folly, I determined to bear with fortitude and temper
the evil I had brought upon myself.”
Miss Martineau, whose voluminous work is ranked by Anna Robeson Burr as
among the great autobiographies of the world, does not condescend to
naïveté; but she never forgets, or permits her reader to forget, what
a superior person she is. When Miss Aiken ventures to congratulate
her upon her “success” in London society, she loftily repudiates the
word. Success implies endeavour, and she (Harriet Martineau) has
“nothing to strive for in any such direction.” When she sails for the
United States, it is with the avowed purpose of “self-discipline.” She
has become “too much accustomed to luxury,” and seeks for wholesome
hardships. It sounds a trifle far-fetched. Byron--an incomparable
traveller--admits that folks who go “a-pleasuring” in the world must
not ask for comfort; but even Byron did not visit the East in order to
be uncomfortable. He was not hunting a corrective for St. James Street
and Piccadilly.
There is no finer example in the world of the happiness of writing an
autobiography than that afforded us by Miss Martineau. Her book is a
real book, not an ephemeral piece of self-flattery. Her enjoyment of
it is so intense that it impedes her progress. She cannot get on with
her narrative because of the delight of lingering. Every circumstance
of an uneventful childhood invites her attention. Other little girls
cry now and then. Mothers and nurserymaids are aware of this fact.
Other little girls hate to get up in the morning. Other little girls
are occasionally impertinent to their parents. But no one else has
ever recorded these details with such serious and sympathetic concern.
A petulant word from an older sister (most of us have lived through
something of the kind) made her resolve “never to tell anybody anything
again.” This resolution was broken. She has told everybody everything,
and the telling must have given her days, and weeks, and months of
undiluted pleasure.
Miss Martineau’s life was in the main a successful one. It is natural
that she should have liked to think about it, and write about it.
But Mrs. Oliphant, a far more brilliant woman, was overburdened,
overworked, always anxious, and often very unhappy. Arthur Young was a
melancholy, disgruntled man, at odds with himself, his surroundings,
and the world. The painter, Haydon, lived through years so harassed by
poverty, so untempered by discretion, so embittered by disappointments,
that his tragic suicide was the only thing which could have brought his
manifold miseries to an end. Yet Mrs. Oliphant took comfort in setting
forth her difficulties, and in expressing a reasonable self-pity.
Arthur Young relieved his mind by a well-worked-out system of intensive
grumbling. Even Haydon seems to have sought and found a dreary solace
in the recital of his woes. The fragment of autobiography is painful to
read, but was evidently the one poor consolation of its writer’s life.
That George Sand’s “Histoire de Ma Vie” afforded its author more than
her proper share of contentment is evidenced by its length, and by the
relish which is stamped on every page. Sir Leslie Stephen pronounced
it the best autobiography he had ever read. It seems to have delighted
him as Rousseau’s “Confessions” delighted Emerson; which goes to
prove that intellectual kinship need not necessarily be accompanied
by any similarity of taste. “If we would really know our hearts,”
says Bishop Wilson, “let us impartially review our actions.” George
Sand and Rousseau reviewed their actions with the fondest solicitude;
but were biased in their own favour. Gibbon reviewed his actions, and
such emotions as he was aware of, with an impartiality that staggers
us; but his heart, at no time an intrusive organ, gave him little
concern. Franklin, with whom truth-telling was never an “ecstasy,” but
a natural process like breathing and eating, reviewed his actions
candidly, if not altogether impartially, and left the record without
boast, or apology, or the reticence dictated by taste, to the judgment
of coming generations. He was a busy man, engaged, like Sully, in
making history on a large scale. It pleased him, not only to write
his recollections, but to bequeath them, as he bequeathed so much
else, to the young nation that he loved. He never sought to patent his
inventions. He never sought to publish his autobiography. His large
outlook embraced the future, and America was his residuary legatee.