My Life as an Author

I have often been asked to prepare an autobiography, but my objections to the task have ever been many and various. To one urgent appeal I sent this sonnet of refusal, which explains itself:--

"You bid me write the story of my life, And draw what secrets in my memory dwell From the dried fountains of her failing well, With commonplaces mixt of peace and strife, And such small facts, with good or evil rife, As happen to us all: I have no tale Of thrilling force or enterprise to tell,-- Nothing the blood to fire, the cheek to pale: My life is in my books: the record there, A truthful photograph, is all I choose To give the world of self; nor will excuse Mine own or others' failures: glad to spare From blame of mine, or praise, both friends and foes, Leaving unwritten what God only knows."

In fact I always rejected the proposal (warned by recent volumes of pestilential reminiscences) and would none of it; not only from its apparent vainglory as to the inevitable extenuation of one's own faults and failures in life, and the equally certain amplification of self-registered virtues and successes,--but even still more from the mischief it might occasion from a petty record of commonplace troubles and trials, due to the "changes and chances of this mortal life," to the casual mention or omission of friends or foes, to the influence of circumstances and surroundings, and to other revelations--whether pleasant or the reverse--of matters merely personal, and therefore more of a private than a public character.

Indeed, so disquieted was I at the possible prospect of any one getting hold of a mass of manuscript in old days diligently compiled by myself from year to year in several small diaries, that I have long ago ruthlessly made a holocaust of the heap of such written self-memories, fearing their posthumous publication; and in this connection let me now add my express protest against the printing hereafter of any of my innumerable private letters to friends, or other MSS., unless they are strictly and merely of a literary nature.

Biography, where honest and true, is no doubt one of the most fascinating and instructive phases of literature; but it requires a higher Intelligence than any (however intimate) friend of a man to do it fairly and fully; so many matters of character and circumstance must ever be to him unknown, and therefore will be by him unrecorded. And even as to autobiography, who, short of the Omniscient Himself, can take into just account the potency of outward surroundings, and still more of inborn hereditary influences, over both mind and body? the bias to good or evil, and the possession or otherwise of gifts and talents, due very much (under Providence) to one's ancient ancestors and one's modern teachers? We are each of us morally and bodily the psychical and physical composite of a thousand generations. Albeit every individual possesses as his birthright a freewill to turn either to the right or to the left, and is liable to a due responsibility for his words and actions, still the Just Judge alone can and must make allowance for the innate inclinings of heredity and the outward influences of circumstance, and He only can hold the balance between the guilt and innocence, the merit or demerit, of His creature.