Seventh Extract
SELF-ESTIMATE
More trouble. Determined to give an estimate of myself based on the best models, I turned to the pages of my Great Example, and ran into the following sentence:
“I do not propose to treat myself like Mr. Bernard Shaw in this account.”
Does this mean that she does not propose to treat herself as if she were Mr. Bernard Shaw? It might. Does it mean that she does not propose to treat herself as Mr. Bernard Shaw treats her? It is not impossible.
What one wants it to mean is: “I do not propose to treat myself as Mr. Bernard Shaw treats himself.” But if she had meant that, she would have said it.
I backed away cautiously, and, a few lines further on, fell over her statement that she has a conception of beauty “not merely in poetry, music, art and nature, but in human beings.” No doubt. And I have a conception of slovenly writing not merely in her autobiography, but in its seventeenth chapter.
I had not gone very much further in that same chapter before I was caught in the following thicket:
“I have got china, books, whips, knives, matchboxes, and clocks given me since I was a small child.”