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INTRODUCTION.
I am--I will not say how old, but well past middle age. This much I
feel compelled to mention, because it has long been my opinion that no
man should attempt a history of himself until he has set foot upon the
border land where the past and the future begin to blend in a
consciousness somewhat independent of both, and hence interpreting
both. Looking westward, from this vantage-ground, the setting sun is
not the less lovely to him that he recalls a merrier time when the
shadows fell the other way. Then they sped westward before him, as if
to vanish, chased by his advancing footsteps, over the verge of the
world. Now they come creeping towards him, lengthening as they come.
And they are welcome. Can it be that he would ever have chosen a world
without shadows? Was not the trouble of the shadowless noon the
dreariest of all? Did he not then long for the curtained queen--the
all-shadowy night? And shall he now regard with dismay the setting sun
of his earthly life? When he looks back, he sees the farthest cloud of
the sun-deserted east alive with a rosy hue. It is the prophecy of the
sunset concerning the dawn. For the sun itself is ever a rising sun,
and the morning will come though the night should be dark.
In this 'season of calm weather,' when the past has receded so far that
he can behold it as in a picture, and his share in it as the history of
a man who had lived and would soon die; when he can confess his faults
without the bitterness of shame, both because he is humble, and because
the faults themselves have dropped from him; when his good deeds look
poverty-stricken in his eyes, and he would no more claim consideration
for them than expect knighthood because he was no thief; when he cares
little for his reputation, but much for his character--little for what
has gone beyond his control, but endlessly much for what yet remains in
his will to determine; then, I think, a man may do well to write his
own life.
'So,' I imagine my reader interposing, 'you profess to have arrived at
this high degree of perfection yourself?'
I reply that the man who has attained this kind of indifference to the
past, this kind of hope in the future, will be far enough from
considering it a high degree of perfection. The very idea is to such a
man ludicrous. One may eat bread without claiming the honours of an
athlete; one may desire to be honest and not count himself a saint. My
object in thus shadowing out what seems to me my present condition of
mind, is merely to render it intelligible to my reader how an
autobiography might come to be written without rendering the writer
justly liable to the charge of that overweening, or self-conceit, which
might be involved in the mere conception of the idea.
In listening to similar recitals from the mouths of elderly people, I
have observed that many things which seemed to the persons principally
concerned ordinary enough, had to me a wonder and a significance they
did not perceive. Let me hope that some of the things I am about to
relate may fare similarly, although, to be honest, I must confess I
could not have undertaken the task, for a task it is, upon this chance
alone: I do think some of my history worthy of being told, just for the
facts' sake. God knows I have had small share of that worthiness. The
weakness of my life has been that I would ever do some great thing; the
saving of my life has been my utter failure. I have never done a great
deed. If I had, I know that one of my temperament could not have
escaped serious consequences. I have had more pleasure when a grown man
in a certain discovery concerning the ownership of an apple of which I
had taken the ancestral bite when a boy, than I can remember to have
resulted from any action of my own during my whole existence. But I
detest the notion of puzzling my reader in order to enjoy her fancied
surprise, or her possible praise of a worthless ingenuity of
concealment. If I ever appear to behave thus, it is merely that I
follow the course of my own knowledge of myself and my affairs, without
any desire to give either the pain or the pleasure of suspense, if
indeed I may flatter myself with the hope of interesting her to such a
degree that suspense should become possible.
When I look over what I have written, I find the tone so sombre--let me
see: what sort of an evening is it on which I commence this book? Ah! I
thought so: a sombre evening. The sun is going down behind a low bank
of grey cloud, the upper edge of which he tinges with a faded yellow.
There will be rain before morning. It is late Autumn, and most of the
crops are gathered in. A bluish fog is rising from the lower meadows.
As I look I grow cold. It is not, somehow, an interesting evening. Yet
if I found just this evening well described in a novel, I should enjoy
it heartily. The poorest, weakest drizzle upon the window-panes of a
dreary roadside inn in a country of slate-quarries, possesses an
interest to him who enters it by the door of a book, hardly less than
the pouring rain which threatens to swell every brook to a torrent. How
is this? I think it is because your troubles do not enter into the book
and its troubles do not enter into you, and therefore nature operates
upon you unthwarted by the personal conditions which so often
counteract her present influences. But I will rather shut out the
fading west, the gathering mists, and the troubled consciousness of
nature altogether, light my fire and my pipe, and then try whether in
my first chapter I cannot be a boy again in such fashion that my
companion, that is, my reader, will not be too impatient to linger a
little in the meadows of childhood ere we pass to the corn-fields of
riper years.
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