My Autobiography: A Fragment

Chapter I

INTRODUCTORY

After the publication of the second volume of my Auld Lang Syne, 1899, I had a good deal of correspondence, of public criticism, and of private communings also with myself, whether I should continue my biographical records in the form hitherto adopted, or give a more personal character to my recollections. Some of my friends were evidently dissatisfied. “The recollections of your friends and the account of the influence they exercised on you,” they said, “are interesting, no doubt, as far as they go, but we want more. We want to know the springs, the aspirations, the struggles, the failures, and achievements of your life. We want to know how you yourself look at yourself and at your past life and its various incidents.” What they really wanted was, in fact, an autobiography. “No one,” as a friend of mine, not an Irishman, said, “could do that so well as yourself, and you will never escape a biographer.” I confess that did not frighten me very much. I did not think the danger of a biography very imminent. Besides, I had already revised two biographies and several biographical notices even during my lifetime. No sensible man ought to care about posthumous praise or posthumous blame. Enough for the day is the evil thereof. Our contemporaries are our right judges, our peers have to give their votes in the great academies and learned societies, and if they on the whole are not dissatisfied with the little we have done, often under far greater difficulties than the world was aware of, why should we care for the distant future? Who was a greater giant in philosophy than Hegel? Who towered higher than Darwin in natural science? Yet in one of the best German reviews[1] the following words of a young German biologist[2] are quoted, and not without a certain approval: “Darwinism belongs now to history, like that other curiosum of our century, the Hegelian philosophy. Both are variations on the theme, How can a generation be led by the nose? and they are not calculated to raise our departing century in the eyes of later generations.”