My Autobiography: A Fragment

by F. Max Müller

Nor are the cases of painters being the sons of great painters, or of poets being the sons of great poets, more numerous. It seems almost as if the artistic talent was exhausted by one generation or one individual, so that we often see the sons of great men by no means great, and if they do anything in the same line as their fathers, we must remember that there was much to induce them to follow in their steps without admitting any atavistic influences.

For the present, I can only repeat the conclusion I arrived at after weighing all the arguments of my friends and critics, namely, to continue my Recollections much as I began them, to try to explain what made me what I am, to describe, in fact, my environment; though as my years advance, and my labours and plans grow wider and wider, I shall, no doubt, have to say a great deal more about myself than in the volumes of Auld Lang Syne. In fact, my Recollections will become more and more of an autobiography, and the I and the Autos will appear more frequently than I could have wished.

In an autobiography the painter is of course supposed to be the same as the sitter, but quite apart from the metaphysical difficulties of such a supposition, there is the physical difficulty when the writer is an old man, and the model is a young boy. Is the old man likely to be a fair judge of the young man, whether it be himself or some one else? As a rule, old men are very indulgent, while young men are apt to be stern and strict in their judgments. The very fact that they often invent excuses for themselves shows that they feel that they want excuses. The words of the Preacher, vii. 16: “Be not righteous over much; neither make thyself over wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself? Be not over much wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldest thou die before thy time?” are evidently the words of an old man when judging of himself or of others. A young man would have spoken differently. He would have made no allowance; for anything like compassion for an erring friend is as yet unknown to him. In an autobiography written by an old man there is therefore a double danger, first the indulgence of the old man, and secondly the kindly feeling of the writer towards the object of his remarks.

All these difficulties stand before me like a mountain wall. And it seems better to confess at once that an old man writing his own life can never be quite just, however honest he tries to be. He may be too indulgent, but he may also be too strict and stern. To say, for instance, of a man that he has not kept his promise, would be a very serious charge if brought against anybody else. Yet my oldest friend in the world knows how many times he has made a promise to himself, and has not only not kept it but has actually found excuses why he did not keep it. The more sensitive our conscience becomes, the more blameworthy many an act of our life seems to be, and what to an ordinary conscience is no fault at all, becomes almost a sin under a fiercer light.

This changes the moral atmosphere of youth when painted by an old man, but the physical atmosphere also assumes necessarily a different hue. Whether we like it or not, distance will always lend enchantment to the view. If the azure hue is inseparable from distant mountains and from the distant sky, we need not wonder that it veils the distant paradise of youth. A man who keeps a diary from his earliest years, and who as an old man simply copies from its yellow pages, may give us a very accurate black and white image of what he saw as a boy, but as in old faded photographs, the life and light are gone out of them, while unassisted memory may often preserve tints of their former reality. There is life and light in such recollections, but I am willing to admit that memory can be very treacherous also. Thus in my own case I can vouch that whatever I relate is carefully and accurately transcribed from the tablets of my memory, as I see them now, but though I can claim truthfulness to myself and to my memory, I cannot pretend to photographic accuracy. I feel indeed for the historian who uses such materials unless he has learnt to make allowance for the dim sight of even the most truthful narrators.

I doubt whether any historian would accept a statement made thirty years after the event without independent confirmation. I could not give the date of the battle of Sadowa, though I well remember reading the full account of it in the Times from day to day. I can of course get at the date from historical books, and from that kind of artificial memory which arises by itself without any memoria technica. There is a favourite German game of cards called Sixty-six, and it was reported that when the French in 1870 shouted À Berlin, the then Crown-Prince who had won the battle of Sadowa, or Königgrätz, said: “Ah, they want another game of Sixty-six!” that is they want a battle like that of Sadowa. In this way I shall always remember the date of that decisive battle. But I could not give the date of the Crimean battles nor a trustworthy account of the successive stages of that war. I doubt whether even my old friend, Sir William H. Russell, could do that now without referring to his letters in the Times. After thirty years no one, I believe, could take an oath to the accuracy of any statement of what he saw or heard so many years ago.

All then that I can vouch for is that I read my memory as I should the leaves of an old MS. from which many letters, nay, whole words and lines have vanished, and where I am often driven to decipher and to guess, as in a palimpsest, what the original uncial writing may have been. I am the first to confess that there may be flaws in my memory, there may be before my eyes that magic azure which surrounds the distant past; but I can promise that there shall be no invention, no Dichtung instead of Wahrheit, but always, as far as in me lies, truth. I know quite well that even a certain dislocation of facts is not always to be avoided in an old memory. I know it from sad experience. As the spires of a city—of Oxford for instance—arrange themselves differently as we pass the old place on the railway, so that now one and now the other stands in the centre and seems to rise above the heads of the rest, so it is with our friends and acquaintances. Some who seemed giants at one time assume smaller proportions as others come into view towering above them. The whole scenery changes from year to year. Who does not remember the trees in our garden that seemed like giants in our childhood, but when we see them again in our old age, they have shrunk, and not from old age only?

And must I make one more confession? It is well known that George the Fourth described the battle of Waterloo so often that at last he persuaded himself that he had been present, in fact that he had won that battle. I also remember Dr. Routh, the venerable president of Magdalen College, who died in his hundredth year, and who had so often repeated all the circumstances of the execution of Charles I, that when Macaulay expressed a wish to see him, he declined “because that young man has given quite a wrong account of the last moments of the king,” which he then proceeded to relate, as if he had been an eye-witness throughout.

Are we not liable to the same hallucination, though, let us hope, in a more mitigated form? Have we never told a story as if it were our own, not from any wish to deceive, but simply because it seemed shorter and easier to do so than to explain step by step how it reached us? And after doing that once or twice, is there not great danger of our being surprised at somebody else claiming the story as his own, or actually maintaining that it was he who told it to us?

Not very long ago I remember reading in a journal a story of the Duke of Wellington. His servant had been sent before to order dinner for him at an out-of-the-way hotel, and in order to impress the landlord with the dignity of his coming guest, he had recited a number of the Duke’s titles, which were very numerous. The landlord, thinking that the Duke of Vittoria, the Prince of Waterloo, the Marquis of Torres Vedras, and all the rest, were friends invited to dine with the Duke of Wellington, ordered accordingly a very sumptuous banquet to the great dismay of the real Duke. This may or may not be a very old and a very true story; all I know is that much the same thing was told at Oxford of Dr. Bull, who was Canon of Christ Church, Canon of Exeter, Prebendary of York, Vicar of Staverton, and lastly, the Rev. Dr. Bull himself. Dinner was provided for each of these persons, and we are told that the reverend pluralist had to eat all the dishes on the table and pay for them. This also may have been no more than one of the many “Common-roomers” which abounded in Oxford when Common Rooms were more frequented than they are now. But what I happen to know as a fact is that Dean Stanley received no less than four invitations to a hall at Blenheim, addressed A. P. Stanley, Esq., the Rev. A. P. Stanley, Canon Stanley, Professor Stanley, all evidently copied from some books of reference.