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?