My Work
Why should I write about this as though any one will wish to read what I write?
People sometimes give me to understand that it is a piece of ridiculous conceit on my part to jot down so many notes about myself, since it implies a confidence that I shall one day be regarded as an interesting person. I answer that neither I nor they can form any idea as to whether I shall be wanted when I am gone or no. The chances are that I shall not. I am quite aware of it. So the chances are that I shall not live to be 85; but I have no right to settle it so. If I do as Captain Don did [Life of Dr. Butler, I, opening of Chapter VIII], and invest every penny I have in an annuity that shall terminate when I am 89, who knows but that I may live on to 96, as he did, and have seven years without any income at all? I prefer the modest insurance of keeping up my notes which others may burn or no as they please.
I am not one of those who have travelled along a set road towards an end that I have foreseen and desired to reach. I have made a succession of jaunts or pleasure trips from meadow to meadow, but no long journey unless life itself be reckoned so. Nevertheless, I have strayed into no field in which I have not found a flower that was worth the finding, I have gone into no public place in which I have not found sovereigns lying about on the ground which people would not notice and be at the trouble of picking up. They have been things which any one else has had—or at any rate a very large number of people have had—as good a chance of picking up as I had. My finds have none of them come as the result of research or severe study, though they have generally given me plenty to do in the way of research and study as soon as I had got hold of them. I take it that these are the most interesting—or whatever the least offensive word may be:
1. The emphasising the analogies between crime and disease. [Erewhon.]
2. The emphasising also the analogies between the development of the organs of our bodies and of those which are not incorporate with our bodies and which we call tools or machines. [Erewhon and Luck or Cunning?]
3. The clearing up the history of the events in connection with the death, or rather crucifixion, of Jesus Christ; and a reasonable explanation, first, of the belief on the part of the founders of Christianity that their master had risen from the dead and, secondly, of what might follow from belief in a single supposed miracle. [The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, The Fair Haven and Erewhon Revisited.]
4. The perception that personal identity cannot be denied between parents and offspring without at the same time denying it as between the different ages (and hence moments) in the life of the individual and, as a corollary on this, the ascription of the phenomena of heredity to the same source as those of memory. [Life and Habit.]
5. The tidying up the earlier history of the theory of evolution. [Evolution Old and New.]
6. The exposure and discomfiture of Charles Darwin and Wallace and their followers. [Evolution Old and New, Unconscious Memory, Luck or Cunning? and “The Deadlock in Darwinism” in the Universal Review republished in Essays on Life, Art and Science.] [376]
7. The perception of the principle that led organic life to split up into two main divisions, animal and vegetable. [Alps and Sanctuaries, close of Chapter XIII: Luck or Cunning?]
8. The perception that, if the kinetic theory is held good, our thought of a thing, whatever that thing may be, is in reality an exceedingly weak dilution of the actual thing itself. [Stated, but not fully developed, in Luck or Cunning? Chapter XIX, also in some of the foregoing notes.]
9. The restitution to Giovanni and Gentile Bellini of their portraits in the Louvre and the finding of five other portraits of these two painters of whom Crowe and Cavalcaselle and Layard maintain that we have no portrait. [Letters to the Athenæum, &c.]
10. The restoration to Holbein of the drawing in the Basel Museum called La Danse. [Universal Review, Nov., 1889.]
11. The calling attention to Gaudenzio Ferrari and putting him before the public with something like the emphasis that he deserves. [Ex Voto.]
12. The discovery of a life-sized statue of Leonardo da Vinci by Gaudenzio Ferrari. [Ex Voto.]
13. The unearthing of the Flemish sculptor Jean de Wespin (called Tabachetti in Italy) and of Giovanni Antonio Paracca. [Ex Voto.]
14. The finding out that the Odyssey was written at Trapani, the clearing up of the whole topography of the poem, and the demonstration, as it seems to me, that the poem was written by a woman and not by a man. Indeed, I may almost claim to have discovered the Odyssey, so altered does it become when my views of it are adopted. And robbing Homer of the Odyssey has rendered the Iliad far more intelligible; besides, I have set the example of how he should be approached. [The Authoress of the Odyssey.]
15. The attempt to do justice to my grandfather by writing The Life and Letters of Dr. Butler for which, however, I had special facilities.
16. In Narcissus and Ulysses I made an attempt, the failure of which has yet to be shown, to return to the principles of Handel and take them up where he left off.
17. The elucidation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. [Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered.]
I say nothing here about my novel [The Way of All Flesh] because it cannot be published till after my death; nor about my translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Nevertheless these three books also were a kind of picking up of sovereigns, for the novel contains records of things I saw happening rather than imaginary incidents, and the principles on which the translations are made were obvious to any one willing to take and use them.
The foregoing is the list of my “mares’-nests,” and it is, I presume, this list which made Mr. Arthur Platt call me the Galileo of Mares’-Nests in his diatribe on my Odyssey theory in the Classical Review. I am not going to argue here that they are all, as I do not doubt, sound; what I want to say is that they are every one of them things that lay on the surface and open to any one else just as much as to me. Not one of them required any profundity of thought or extensive research; they only required that he who approached the various subjects with which they have to do should keep his eyes open and try to put himself in the position of the various people whom they involve. Above all, it was necessary to approach them without any preconceived theory and to be ready to throw over any conclusion the moment the evidence pointed against it. The reason why I have discarded so few theories that I have put forward—and at this moment I cannot recollect one from which there has been any serious attempt to dislodge me—is because I never allowed myself to form a theory at all till I found myself driven on to it whether I would or no. As long as it was possible to resist I resisted, and only yielded when I could not think that an intelligent jury under capable guidance would go with me if I resisted longer. I never went in search of any one of my theories; I never knew what it was going to be till I had found it; they came and found me, not I them. Such being my own experience, I begin to be pretty certain that other people have had much the same and that the soundest theories have come unsought and without much effort.
The conclusion, then, of the whole matter is that scientific and literary fortunes are, like money fortunes, made more by saving than in any other way—more through the exercise of the common vulgar essentials, such as sobriety and straightforwardness, than by the more showy enterprises that when they happen to succeed are called genius and when they fail, folly. The streets are full of sovereigns crying aloud for some one to come and pick them up, only the thick veil of our own insincerity and conceit hides them from us. He who can most tear this veil from in front of his eyes will be able to see most and to walk off with them.
I should say that the sooner I stop the better. If on my descent to the nether world I were to be met and welcomed by the shades of those to whom I have done a good turn while I was here, I should be received by a fairly illustrious crowd. There would be Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, Leonardo da Vinci, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Holbein, Tabachetti, Paracca and D’Enrico; the Authoress of the Odyssey would come and Homer with her; Dr. Butler would bring with him the many forgotten men and women to whom in my memoir I have given fresh life; there would be Buffon, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck; Shakespeare also would be there and Handel. I could not wish to find myself in more congenial company and I shall not take it too much to heart if the shade of Charles Darwin glides gloomily away when it sees me coming.