Nobody ever wrote a dull autobiography. If one may make such a bull, the very dulness would be interesting. The autobiographer has ex officio two qualifications of supreme importance in all literary work. He is writing about a topic in which he is keenly interested, and about a topic upon which he is the highest living authority. It may be reckoned, too, as a special felicity that an autobiography, alone of all books, may be more valuable in proportion to the amount of misrepresentation which it contains. We do not wonder when a man gives a false character to his neighbour, but it is always curious to see how a man contrives to present a false testimonial to himself. It is pleasant to be admitted behind the scenes and trace the growth of that singular phantom which, like the Spectre of the Brocken, is the man's own shadow cast upon the coloured and distorting mists of memory. Autobiography for these reasons is so generally interesting, that I have frequently thought with the admirable Benvenuto Cellini that it should be considered as a duty by all eminent men; and, indeed, by men not eminent. As every sensible man is exhorted to make his will, he should also be bound to leave to his descendants some account of his experience of life. The dullest of us would in spite of themselves say something profoundly interesting, if only by explaining how they came to be so dull—a circumstance which is sometimes in great need of explanation. On reflection, however, we must admit that autobiography done under compulsion would be in danger of losing the essential charm of spontaneity. The true autobiography is written by one who feels an irresistible longing for confidential expansion; who is forced by his innate constitution to unbosom himself to the public of the kind of matter generally reserved for our closest intimacy. Confessions dictated by a sense of duty, like many records of religious experience, have rarely the peculiar attractiveness of those which are prompted by the simple longing for human sympathy. Nothing, indeed, in all literature is more impressive than some of the writings in which great men have laid bare to us the working of their souls in the severest spiritual crises. But the solemnity and the loftiness of purpose generally remove such work to a rather different category. Augustine's 'Confessions' is an impassioned meditation upon great religious and philosophical questions which only condescends at intervals to autobiographical detail. Few books, to descend a little in the scale, are more interesting, whether to the fellow-believer or to the psychological observer, than Bunyan's 'Grace Abounding.' We follow this real pilgrim through a labyrinth of strange scruples invented by a quick brain placed for the time at the service of a self-torturing impulse, and peopled by the phantoms created by a poetical imagination under stress of profound excitement. Incidentally we learn to know and to love the writer, and certainly not the less because the spiritual fermentation reveals no morbid affectation. We give him credit for exposing the trial and the victory simply and solely for the reason which he alleges; that is to say, because he really thinks that his experience offers useful lessons to his fellow-creatures. He is no attitudiniser, proud at the bottom of his heart of the sensibility which he professes to lament, nor a sanctimonious sentimentalist stimulating a false emotion for purposes of ostentation. He is as simple, honest, and soundhearted as he is tender and impassioned. But these very merits deprive the book of some autobiographical interest. It never enters his head that anybody will care about John Bunyan the tinker, or the details of his tinkering. He who painted the scenes in Vanity Fair could have drawn a vivid picture of Elstow and Bedford, of Puritanical preachers and Cromwellian soldiers, and the judges and gaolers under Charles II. Here and there, in scattered passages of his works, he gives us graphic anecdotes in passing which set the scene before us vividly as a bit of Pepys's diaries. The incidents connected with his commitment to prison are described with a dramatic force capable of exciting the envy of a practised reporter. But we see only enough to tantalise us with the possibilities. He tells us so little of his early life that his biographers cannot make up their minds as to whether he was, as Southey calls him, a 'blackguard,' or a few degrees above or below that zero-point of the scale of merit. Lord Macaulay takes it for granted that he was in the Parliamentary, and Mr. Froude thinks it almost proved that he was in the Royalist army. He tells us nothing of the death of the first wife, whose love seems to have raised him from blackguardism; nor of his marriage to the second wife, who stood up for him so bravely before the judges, and was his faithful companion to the end of his pilgrimage. The book is therefore a profoundly interesting account of one phase in the development of the character of our great prose-poet; but hardly an autobiography. The narrative was worth writing, because his own heart, like his allegorical Mansoul, had been the scene of one incident in the everlasting struggle between the powers of light and darkness, not because the scene had any independent interest of its own.

In this one may be disposed to say Bunyan judged rightly. The wisest man, it is said, is he who realises most clearly the narrow limits of human knowledge; the greatest should be penetrated with the strongest conviction of his own insignificance. The higher we rise above the average mass of mankind, the more clearly we should see our own incapacity for acting the part of Providence. The village squire who does not really believe in anything invisible from his own steeple, may fancy that he is of real importance to the world, for the world for him means his village. 'P. P. clerk of this parish' thought that all future generations would be interested in the fact that he had smoothed the dog's-ears in the great Bible. A genuine statesman who knows something of the forces by which the world is governed should have seen through the humbug of history. He should have learnt the fable of the fly and the chariot wheel, and be aware that what are called his achievements are really the events upon which, through some accident of position, he has been allowed to inscribe his name. One stage in a nation's life gets itself labelled Cromwell, and another William Pitt; but perhaps Pitt and Cromwell were really of little more importance than some contemporary P. P. This doctrine, however, is considered, I know not why, to be immoral, and to smack of fatalism, cynicism, jealousy of great men, and other objectionable tendencies. We are in a tacit conspiracy to flatter conspicuous men at the expense of their fellow-workers, and he is the most generous and appreciative who can heap the greatest number of superlatives upon growing reputations, and add a stone to the gigantic pile of eulogy under which the historical proportions of some great figures are pretty well buried. We must not complain, therefore, if we flatter the vanity which seems to be the most essential ingredient in the composition of a model biographer. A man who expects that future generations will be profoundly interested in the state of his interior seems to be drawing a heavy bill upon posterity. And yet it is generally honoured. We are flattered perhaps by this exhibition of confidence. We are touched by the demand for sympathy. There is something pathetic in this belief that we shall be moved by the record of past sufferings and aspirations as there is in a child's confidence that you will enter into its little fears and hopes. And perhaps vanity is so universal a weakness, and, in spite of good moralising, it so strongly resembles a virtue in some of its embodiments, that we cannot find it in our hearts to be angry with it. We can understand it too thoroughly. And then we make an ingenious compromise with our consciences. Our interest in Pepys's avowals of his own foibles, for example, is partly due to the fact that whilst we are secretly conscious of at least the germs of similar failings, the consciousness does not bring any sense of shame, because we set down the confession to the account of poor Pepys himself. The man who, like Goldsmith, is so running over with jealousy that he is forced to avow it openly, seems to be a sort of excuse to us for cherishing a less abundant stock of similar sentiment. This is one occult source of pleasure in reading autobiography. We have a delicate shade of conscious superiority in listening to the vicarious confession. 'I am sometimes troubled,' said Boswell, 'by a disposition to stinginess.' 'So am I,' replied Johnson, 'but I do not tell it.' That is our attitude in regard to the autobiographer. After all, we say to ourselves, this distinguished person is such a one as we are; and even more so, for he cannot keep it to himself. The conclusion is not quite fair, it may be, when applied to the case of a diarist like Pepys, who, poor man, meant only to confide his thoughts to his note-books. But it applies more or less to every genuine autobiographer—to every man, that is, who has deliberately written down a history of his own feelings and thoughts for the benefit of posterity.

The prince of all autobiographers in this full sense of the word—the man who represents the genuine type in its fullest realisation—is undoubtedly Rousseau. The 'Confessions' may certainly be regarded as not only one of the most remarkable, but as in parts one of the most repulsive, books ever written. Yet, one must add, it is also one of the most fascinating. Rousseau starts by declaring that he is undertaking a task which has had no precedent, and will have no imitators—the task of showing a man in all the truth of nature, and that man himself. How far he is perfectly sincere in this, or in the declaration which immediately follows, that no one of his readers will be able to pronounce himself a better man than Jean Jacques Rousseau, is a question hardly to be answered. The avowal is at any rate characteristic of the true autobiographer. It reflects the subtle vanity which, taking now the guise of perfect sincerity, and now that of deep humility, encourages us to colour as highly as possible both our vices and our virtues as equally entitling us to the sympathies of mankind: that strange and Protean sensibility which we are puzzled to classify either as an excessive craving for admiration, or a mere morbid desire for self-abasement. Certainly in Rousseau it sometimes shows itself in a shamelessness which it is very hard to forgive unless we will admit the ambiguous and well-worn plea of partial insanity. The pleasure—always, it must be granted, a very questionable one—of recognising our own failings in our superiors, passes too often into sheer disgust or shuddering horror at the spectacle of genius grovelling in the mire. But Rousseau represents an abnormal development of all the qualities of his class; and this, the ugliest amongst the autobiographic instincts, is hardly developed out of proportion to the rest. And, therefore, if we cannot quite forgive, we are not altogether alienated. We read, for example, one of those amazing confessions of contemptible meanness which makes us wonder that human fingers could commit them to paper: the story of his casting the blame of a petty theft upon an innocent girl, to her probable ruin; of his desertion of his friend lying in a fit on the pavement of a strange town; of the more grievous crime of his abandonment of his own children to the foundling hospital. How can any interest survive in the narrator except that kind of interest which a physiologist takes in some ghastly disease? It would be a libel upon ourselves to suppose that we see the reflections of our own hearts in such narratives, or that we can in any degree take them as an indirect flattery to our own superiority. Such an emotion may conceivably be present in some other passages. When, for example, we read how, on the death of a dear friend, Rousseau confesses to one who loved them both that he derived some pleasure from the reflection that he should inherit an excellent black coat, he may perhaps be giving to us the sort of satisfaction which we derive from a keen maxim of Rochefoucauld. We recognise the truth—painful though it may be in itself—that some strand of mean and selfish feeling may be interwoven with genuine regret; and we may reconcile ourselves by interpreting it as a proof that some of the sentiments for which we have blushed are not inconsistent with real kindness of heart. We may smile still more harmlessly at the quaint avowal of absurdity when Rousseau decides that he will test the probability of his future fate by throwing a stone at a tree trunk. A hit is to mean salvation, and a miss, damnation. He chooses a very big trunk very close to him, succeeds in hitting it, and sets his mind at rest. We may congratulate ourselves without malice on this proof that men of genius may indulge in very grotesque follies. A student of human nature may be grateful for a frank avowal now and then of the 'fears of the brave and follies of the wise.' But how can we justify ourselves in point of taste—to say nothing of morality—at not shrinking back from the more hideous avowals of downright depravity contained in this strange record which is to convince us that none amongst the sons of men can claim superiority to Rousseau?

The answer is not far to seek. One leading peculiarity of Rousseau, the great prophet of sentimentalism, is that exaltation of the immediate sensation at the expense of hard realities which is the mark of all sentimentalism. He can enjoy intensely, but cannot restrain a single impulse with a view to future enjoyment. He can sympathise keenly with immediate sufferings, but shrinks from admitting that indulgence may be the worst cruelty. His only rule of life is to give free play to his impulses. All discipline is tyranny. Education is to consist in stimulating the emotions at the expense of the reason. And, therefore, facts in general are on the whole objectionable and inconvenient things. Your practical man is merely a wheel in a gigantic machinery, for ever grinding out barren results and never leaving himself time for the pure happiness of feeling. He would abolish space and time to make one dreamer happy. Dreamland is the only true reality. There facts conform to feeling instead of crushing it out of existence. There we can be optimists; see virtue rewarded, simplicity honoured, genius appreciated, and the substance of happiness pursued instead of its idle shadows—external show, and hard-won triumphs that pall in the fruition. Nothing is more characteristic of this tendency than the passage in which he describes the composition of the 'Nouvelle HÉloÏse.' The impossibility, he says, of grasping realities cast him into the land of chimeras: seeing nothing in existence which was worthy of his delirium, he nourished it in an ideal world which his creative imagination soon peopled with beings after his own heart. He was in love—not with an external object, but with love itself; he formed out of his passionate longings those beautiful, unreal, highstrung beings, whose ecstasies and agonies kept fine ladies sitting up all night in forgetfulness of balls and assemblies, and which now, alas! have faded, as unreal things are apt to fade, and become rather wearisome and slightly absurd. Facts revenge themselves upon the man who denies their existence; and poor Rousseau did not escape the inevitable Nemesis. His follies and his crimes sprang from this fatal habit of sacrificing everything to the immediate impulse; his reveries seduced him into the region of downright illusions; and his optimism—by a curious, but not uncommon inversion—became the strongest proof of his actual misery. He found realities so painful that he swore that they must be dreams; as dreams were so sweet, that they must be the true realities. 'All men are born free,' as he says in his famous sentence; 'and men are everywhere in chains.' That is the true Rousseau logic. Everything must be right in some transcendental sense, because in an actual sense everything is wrong. We say that men take a cheerful or a doleful view of the universe according to the state of their own livers; but sometimes the reverse seems to hold good. It requires, it would seem, unusual buoyancy of spirits to endure the thought that the world is a scene of misery; and the belief in its happiness is sometimes the attempt of the miserable man to reconcile himself to his lot. Anyhow, Rousseau had learnt this dangerous lesson. He suffered from a morbid appetite for happiness; his intense longing for enjoyment stimulated an effeminate shrinking from the possibility of the crumpled rose-leaf. He identified himself with the man who left his mistress in order to write letters to her. The absent—in this sense—have no blemishes. And this is true of the past as of the distant. Foresight, he says, always spoilt his enjoyment; the future is pure loss to him; for to look forward is always to anticipate possibilities of evil. He lives entirely, as he says elsewhere, in the present; but in a present which includes the enjoyment of the past pleasures. 'Not heaven itself upon the past has power,' and we can nowhere be absolutely safe except in brooding over the moments of happiness which have survived by reason of their pleasantness.

This is part of the charm of the 'Confessions.' Finding no pure enjoyment in the present, he says, he returned by fits to the serene days of his youth. He chewed the cud of past delight, and lived again his life at the Charmettes. Hence sprang the 'Nouvelle HÉloÏse,' placed amongst the scenery of his early youth and constantly reviving real experiences. He apologises for giving us the details of his youth; but the apology is clearly needless. He gives what he delights in. His youthful memories grow brighter as the latter become effaced; the least facts of that time please him, because they are of that time. He remembers the place, the people, the time; the servant moving in the room, the swallow entering the window, the fly settling on his hand whilst he writes his lesson; he trembles with pleasure as he recalls the minutest details—and we feel the reflection of his delight. Indeed, this is one secret of most autobiography. There is something touching in those introductory fragments which are so common in autobiographies. The old man, we see, has been enticed to write a book by the charm of the first chapter. He tells us with eager interest the story of his early days; he remembers the village school and his initiation into the alphabet, or calls up the sacred vision of the mother whose figure still stands out amidst the mists of memory; but as he reaches the point where the light of common day blends with the romantic colouring of childhood, his hand fails, and he sums up the remainder of his history, if he has the courage to continue, in a few barren facts and dates. The phenomenon recurs again and again and leaves us to infer, according to our tastes, that infancy is the time of real happiness, or that the appearance of happiness always belongs to the distant. Rousseau tries to explain it in his own case. He long remained a child, he says; objects always made less impression upon him than their memories; and as all his ideas were images, the first engraved were the deepest, and the later rather blended with them than effaced them.

To explain Rousseau's power over his generation, and even his strongest interest for us, we should require to add other considerations. Rousseau's dreams, in fact, were not those of the mystic or of the poetical philosopher. If he cared, in one sense, very little for facts, it was because the past and the present overpowered the future. He could not cut himself apart from the world, as some meditative minds have done who live by choice in the region of abstract speculation. His temperament was too sensuous, his sympathies with those around him too keen, to permit him to find a permanent refuge in the gorgeous but unsubstantial world of poetic imagery. His senses bound him fast to realities as upon a rock on which he was always struggling impatiently and spasmodically. It is in the vicissitudes of this struggle that the interest of his personal story consists. For it leads him to find that solution which has been preached in one form or other by so many moralists in all ages, and which had a special meaning for the society of his day. Ancient philosophers said that the great secret of life is in placing your happiness in things which depend upon ourselves, and not in things which are at the mercy of circumstance. Happiness, says a modern prophet, is to be found by lessening your denominator, not by increasing your numerator; by restricting your wants, not by multiplying your enjoyments. The great illusion of life is the childish fancy that you can get the moon by crying for it, instead of learning that the moon is beyond your reach. You must learn the great secret of renunciation. Rousseau's version of this doctrine was given with an intensity of conviction which moved the hearts of his contemporaries; and the 'Confessions' are a kind of continuous comment upon the text. Are we, it may be asked, to take the ascetic view—to admit that happiness is impossible in this life, and to seek future blessedness by mortifying the affections which seek for present gratification? No, Rousseau would say; happiness is everything; to get as much enjoyment out of life as we possibly can is the one conceivable end of a human being. Nobody could be a more thorough hedonist. Then, should we seek for happiness in active life devoted to some absorbing ambition, or rather in courting those lofty emotions or those intellectual tastes which are the fruit of a thorough cultivation of our faculties? No, again; for active life means weariness and disappointment, and exchange of substance for vain shadows; and the more men are cultivated, the more sophisticated and unreal become their lives, and the less their real powers of enjoyment. Then, should we be Epicureans of the vulgar type, and give ourselves up to the indulgence of animal appetites? That, again, though Rousseau sometimes falls into perilous approximation to that error in practice, is as far as possible from his better mind. Nobody, in fact—and it is the redeeming quality in his life—could set a higher value upon the simple affections. A life of calm domestic tranquillity—the idyllic life of unsophisticated country villages, of regular labour, and innocent recreation—is the ideal which he set before his generation with all the fervour of his eloquence. That he made a terrible mess of it himself is undeniable; it is equally undeniable that the praises of domestic life come with a very bad grace from the man who sanctioned the worst practices of a corrupt society by abandoning his own children, though he tries to represent even that amazing delinquency as a corollary from his principles; and it must also be admitted that his Arcadia has too often the taint of sentimental unreality. But the doctrine takes a worthier form, not only in those passages of his speculative writings which manifest his deep sympathy with the poor and simple crushed under an effete system of social tyranny, but in the many passages of the 'Confessions' where he recalls his brief approximations to a realisation of his dreams. He might claim to have found 'love in huts where poor men lie;' and to have been qualified by experience for recognising the surpassing beauty of simple happiness. That is the secret charm of those eloquent passages to which the jaded fine ladies and gentlemen of his days turned again and again with an enthusiastic sympathy which it would be grossly unjust to set down as mere affectation. Such, for example, is his description of the delicious strolls by his beloved Lake of Geneva, where every scene was redolent of youthful associations; where he seemed to be almost within reach of that sweet tranquil life which was yet for him but a vanishing mirage; and where alone he declares that he might obtain perfect happiness, if he had but a faithful friend, a loving wife, a cow, and a little boat. He smiles sadly enough at the simplicity which has frequently led him to that region in search of this imaginary bliss, and at the contrast between the dream and the reality. Even in Paris he could grasp a like phantom. Here with his half-idiotic Theresa (who had, however, the heart of an angel), he found perfect happiness for a time. He pictures himself sitting at the open window, the sill forming his table, for a frugal supper; looking down upon the street from the fourth story, and enjoying a crust of bread, a few cherries, a bit of cheese, and a bottle of wine. Who, he exclaims, can feel the happiness of these feasts? Friendship, confidence, intimacy, gentleness of soul, how sweet is the seasoning you bring! And, of course, he soon passes to a confession proving that his paradise had its snake. But the better sentiment, though clogged and degraded by ignoble passions, almost reconciles us to the man. Rousseau represents the strange combination of a kind of sensual appetite for pure and simple pleasures. On one side he reminds us of Keats, by his intense appreciation of sensuous beauty; and, on the other, of Cowper, by his love of such simple pleasures as our English poet enjoyed when sitting at Mrs. Unwin's tea-urn. It is a strange, almost a contradictory mixture; but Rousseau's life is a struggle between antagonisms; and until you admit that human nature is in some sense a contradictory compound, and can take delight in the queer results which grow out of them, you are hardly qualified to be a student of autobiography. Your proper biographer glides over these difficulties, or tries to find some reconciliation. The man who tells his own story reveals them because he is unconscious of their mixture.

Rousseau, I said, was the type of all autobiographers; and for the obvious reason, that no man ever turned himself inside out for the inspection of posterity so completely, and that even when he was unconscious of the exposure. Even his affectations are instructive. But when we think of some other autobiographers we may be inclined to retract. There are, when one comes to reflect, more ways of killing a cat than choking her with cream: and there are more ways of revealing your character than by this deliberate introspection, this brooding over past feelings, and laying bare every impulse of your nature. So, if Rousseau is to be called the typical autobiographer, it is perhaps in virtue simply of those strange contradictions which give piquancy to his 'Confessions,' and to those of many other men to whom the great problem of existence presented itself in different terms. So, for example, it would be difficult to imagine a more complete antithesis to Rousseau than we find in Benvenuto Cellini, whose autobiography is almost equally interesting in a totally different way. He is a man in whose company the very conception of sentimentalism seems to be an absurdity; who is so incapable of reflective brooding that he is just as proud of his worst crimes as of his greatest artistic achievements; who tells with equal glee how he struck his dagger into the nape of his enemy's neck, and made a gold button of unparalleled beauty for the Pope's cope; who is so full of energy that his life seems to be one desperate struggle, and who is most at home in the periods of most overpowering excitement, whether firing guns at the siege of Rome, or pitching all his plate into the furnace to help the fusing of the statue of Perseus; so full of intense vitality that when we read his memoirs it becomes difficult to realise the fact that all these throbbing passions and ambitions are still for ever, and that we peaceable readers are alive; at once a man of high artistic genius, and yet such a braggart and a liar as to surpass Bobadil or the proverbial Ferdinand Mendez Pinto; a standing refutation of that pleasant moral commonplace which tries to associate genius with modesty; a queer compound of reckless audacity and defiance of all constituted authority with abject superstition; a man, in short, who makes us wonder, as we read, whether the world has advanced or gone back; whether we have gained or lost by substituting the douce, respectable jeweller, and the vulgar blackguard of modern London, for this magnificent goldsmith bravo of the Florence of the sixteenth century. The only writer in our own literature who, at a long interval, recalls this brilliant apparition, is Lord Herbert of Cherbury. In him, too, we find the singular combination of the fire-eating duellist with the man of high intellectual power. Horace Walpole, who procured the publication of his autobiography, says that the reader will be astonished to find that the 'history of Don Quixote was the life of Plato.' Herbert, it is true, was not quite a Plato nor a Quixote. His thirst for chivalrous adventures may indeed remind us of the Don or of Cellini; yet somehow, though he wandered through Europe in true knight-errant spirit, always on the look-out for occasions of proving that courage for which, so he declares, he had as high a reputation as any man of his time, and was as irritable, punctilious, and given to dare-devil deeds as the most precise of cavaliers could desire, he seems to have had singular ill-luck. Somehow, the authorities always interpose to prevent his fighting. The vanity of Lord Herbert is of a more reflective and priggish type than that of Cellini. Instead of taking himself for granted, with the superlative audacity of his predecessor, he contemplates his own perfections complacently, and draws his own portrait for the benefit of his descendants, as an embodiment of the perfect gentleman accomplished in all knightly arts, and full to overflowing of the most becoming sentiments. He has, in fact, a rather obtrusive moral sense, whereas an entire absence of any encumbrance of that kind is one of Cellini's peculiarities; or, at least, the Italian assumes that whatever he does must be right, whereas the Englishman is simply convinced that he does whatever is right. Herbert parades himself as a model with an amazing consciousness of his own perfection, and sets forth his various natural endowments—such, for example, as the delicious odour which exudes from his body and perfumes even his clothes—as a kind of providential testimony to his merits. When a voice from heaven orders him to publish his great book 'De Veritate,' we feel that no human imprimatur would be adequate to so important an occasion. And, in spite of his swelling self-satisfaction, we must admit that he has real claims upon our respect; in fact, Herbert, though not so great a poet as his brother George, at least wrote one poem which has a curious interest as anticipating, not only the metre, but, in some degree, the sentiment, of 'In Memoriam;' and, though less conspicuous as a philosopher than Bacon or Hobbes, wrote books in which it is possible to trace some remarkable analogies to the teaching of Kant. When Walpole and Gray first tried to read the life they could not get on for 'laughing and screaming,' and Walpole was rather vexed when people took Herbert a little too seriously, and were inclined to admire him as a worthy successor to Sir Philip Sidney. Yet Herbert is but one of many proofs (perhaps Walpole himself was another) that all coxcombs are not fools.

We have, it is plain, got a long way from Rousseau. We are almost, it may be said, at the very opposite pole of character. If vanity be a determining force in both cases, it is in the two cases controlled and directed by opposite passions. Combined with a morbid tendency to retrospection, a weak self-pity, an effeminate shrinking from pain, it reveals itself as a perverse pleasure in baring to public gaze those viler impulses which most men shrink from revealing to themselves. In the masterful, overbearing, active character, it appears in the more natural shape of straightforward ostentation, though it sometimes leads to the same end; for it displays follies and vices, not because they are shameful, but for the opposite reason that it sees nothing in them to be ashamed of. Whether it should be called by the same name, as manifested in the one or in the other combination, is a question for the unlucky psychologist who has already a sufficient burden of insoluble problems. And we might find new puzzles in abundance for the same person by tracing the manifold transformations of the same Protean quality. We might skip from the Quixote-Plato—rather, one might say, the Bobadil-Kant—to another biographer, like him in little but the power of amusing, the vivacious Colley Cibber. Cibber's vanity is of a simpler type. It seems to be an unaccountable freak of nature that Cibber should have been the descendant of a Schleswig-Holstein father and an English mother. We could have sworn that he was a born Frenchman. His vanity is that which we generally attribute to the race whom we used to call our 'lively neighbours.' In other words, instead of being priggish or sulky like the English, it is closely allied to good sense, good humour, and simplicity. It implies unfeigned self-complacency quite unalloyed by self-deception. It supplied the excellent Colley with an armour of proof which made him absolutely impervious even to the most vicious stings of Pope's poisonous satire. He took all ridicule with the most imperturbable good temper, because he fully recognised, and was perfectly reconciled to the fact that he was ridiculous. He writes his life, as he tells us with admirable serenity, because he was vain, and liked to talk about himself. What can the critic say more? 'Expose me? Why, dear sir, does not every man that writes expose himself? Can you make me more ridiculous than nature has made me?' To hurt such a man by correct portraiture was impossible; and when Pope tried to injure him by giving him the absurdly incorrect name of Dunce, the satirist missed his mark too palpably to hurt anybody but himself. And so, though the laughing-stock of all the wits, assailed by Pope and Fielding, the lucky Cibber, lapped in his invulnerable vanity, went gaily through his eighty-six years of life, as brisk and buoyant to the end as when he had only to go upon the stage with his natural manners to be the ideal representative of the Foppingtons and Easys of his own comedy. If the autobiography be slightly deficient on the side of sentiment, we may console ourselves by admitting that some of the descriptions of the actors of the time would not disgrace Charles Lamb. Would we find another variety of innocent and excessive vanity? Take up the memoirs—unfortunately fragmentary—of one whose long life ran side by side with Cibber's for some eighty-two years, though in oddly different surroundings,—Swift's 'wicked Will Whiston,' so called because so transparently guileless and well-meaning that even bigots could only smile at his absurdities. In reading him we fancy that we must be studying a new version of the 'Vicar of Wakefield.' In truth, however, that good Dr. Primrose was one of Whiston's disciples, and got into trouble, as we may remember, by advocating a crotchet learnt from his predecessor a little too warmly. The master, however, suffered longer than the disciple, and shows just the same innocuous vanity in regard to his own supposed discoveries, and the same simple-minded wonder that others should fail to be converted, or should refuse to sacrifice preferment to crotchets about the date of the Apostolic Constitutions. Whiston's self-complacency reappears with a difference in Baxter's ponderous autobiography. The copious outpourings of the good man help us to understand the report, which he can happily deny, that his multitudinous publications had ruined his bookseller; but it is full of interesting display of character, and nowhere more than in the profound conviction that if he had been able to apply a few more sermons he would have converted Cromwell and his troopers from their rebellious purposes, and the innocent enthusiasm with which he hurls his elaborate syllogisms at the heads of Charles II.'s bishops, believing, poor man, in all good faith that the policy of the Restoration government was to be determined by scholastic argumentation.

If we seek for an excellent contrast we may go to those admirable representatives of the worldly bishop of the now extinct type, Newton or Watson. There is something quite touching in Watson's complaints of an unappreciative world. He had been made a professor of chemistry without having studied the very elements of the science, a professor of divinity without having studied theology before, or taking the trouble to study it afterwards. He was appointed to a bishopric because he was a sound Whig, and passed his life in a delightful country town on the banks of Windermere without ever bothering himself to reside in his Welsh diocese. But the stoppage of his preferment at this point is for him a conclusive proof that true Christian principles could not meet with their reward in this world. How else account for this scandalous neglect of one who, in addition to all his other merits, had taken great trouble to plant trees, and to make an honourable provision for his children—as well as giving them a sound education? It is a natural corollary that the man whose memoirs are thus a continuous grumble over the absence of preferment should specially pride himself on his thorough self-respect. He belongs, he says, to the oaks, not to the willows. Whenever he asks for a vacant bishopric, he explains that it is only in deference to the wishes of his friends. For himself he asks for nothing better than a life of retirement, though the king and his ministers will be eternally disgraced for having left him to enjoy that blessing. The finest satirist, Fielding or Thackeray, might have been proud of portraying this ingenious and yet transparent self-deception; of unravelling the artifice by which worldliness and preferment hunting are so wrapped in blustering self-assertion as to appear—to the actor himself—as dignified independence of spirit.

Running over such varieties of character, we may ask whether it is fair to set down the autobiographic impulse as in all cases a manifestation of vanity. Or if we call it vanity, must we not stretch the meaning of the word beyond all bearing? The old psychologists used to maintain that every passion was a special form of self-love; and, if we may take such a license, we may call every man vain who takes an interest in his own affairs, and expects that others may be interested. He may hold that opinion even whilst sincerely believing that his success in the game of life was more due to the cards he held than to his intrinsic skill. If that still imply the presence of some latent vanity, some bias to our judgment lying below the region of conscious reflection, it is certainly of a scarcely perceptible kind. Vanity in this sense is but the inverse side of a man's philosophy of life. It is the value which he sets upon certain qualities of mind and character, which is, no doubt, apt to be more or less connected with the trifling circumstance that he takes them to be his own. But in some cases this latter consideration has so little prominence that we almost overlook it. The autobiography takes so much the form of a philosophical sermon on the true principles of conduct, that we quite forget that the preacher is his own text. He treats himself with apparent impartiality, as if he were merely a scientific specimen whose excellent adaptation to the general scheme of things deserves the notice of an impartial inquirer. It happens to be the case nearest at hand, but is interesting only in the light of the general impersonal principle.

It is curious to trace this in one of the most interesting of modern autobiographies. J. S. Mill begins his recollections by disavowing—with obvious sincerity—any egoistic motive. He wishes to show the effect of a particular mode of education, to trace the influence upon a receptive mind of various currents of modern thought; and, above all, to show how large a debt he owed to certain persons who, but for this avowal, would not receive their due meed of recognition. He is to give a lecture upon his own career as dispassionately as Professor Owen might lecture upon a creature which died in the palÆozoic era. In pursuing this end, Mill made more revelations as to his own character than he perhaps knew himself. The book is much else, but it is also an exposition of a definite theory of life. Some readers were astonished to find that, as Mill puts it, a Benthamite might be something more than a mere 'reasoning machine.' That description, he admits, was applicable in some cases, and even to himself at one period of his life. But nothing could be clearer to readers of the autobiography—as, indeed, it was clear enough to the observers of his later career—that, so far from being a mere reasoning machine, Mill was a man of strong affections, and even feminine sensibility. And in this, as some critics have said, consists the peculiar pathos of the book. It was the story of a man of strong feelings, who had been put into a kind of moral and logical strait-waistcoat and kept there till it had become a part of himself. The diagnosis of the case showed it, upon this understanding, to be one of partial atrophy of the affections—or rather—for the affections clearly survived—illustrated the effect of depriving them of their natural sustenance. To Mill himself, it was rather a record of the means by which the strait-waistcoat had been forced to yield. Like Bunyan, he had been locked up by Giant Despair, and had escaped from the dungeons, though by a different method. The account of the crisis in his moral development which corresponds to a conversion in the case of Bunyan, gives the real key to his story. He had been put into the strait-waistcoat by that tremendous old gentleman, James Mill, whose force of mind produced less effect through his books than by his personal influence upon his immediate surroundings. His doctrine repelled most readers till it had been made more sympathetic by passing through the more sensitive and emotional nature of his son. The ultimate effect was not to suppress J. S. Mill's affections, but to confine them to certain narrow channels. The primary effect, however, was to produce that 'reasoning machine' period in which the son was a simple logic-mill grinding out the materials supplied by the father and Bentham. Now old Mill was not simply a kind of personified 'categorical imperative'—a rigid external conscience imposing a fixed rule upon his filial disciple, but his doctrine was certainly a trying one. He held that the sole end of morality was to produce happiness, and at the same time he did not believe in happiness. 'He thought human life a poor thing at best after the freshness of youth and unsatisfied curiosity had gone by.' He and his disciples denounced all emotion as 'sentimentality,' and fully shared that English prejudice which, as J. S. Mill declares, regards feeling, especially if it has a touch of the romantic or exalted, to be something intrinsically disgraceful. Here then was the uncomfortable dilemma into which the younger Mill was driven, and which made him miserable. A rigid sense of duty was the sole rule of life; duty meant the production of happiness; and happiness was a mere illusion and unsubstantial phantom. No wonder if a period followed during which the world seemed to him weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. To feel that all that is left for one is to be a machine grinding out theorems in political economy is certainly not an exhilarating state of things.

The escape from this condition, as Mill represents, involved two discoveries, which, like all such discoveries, are old enough in the state of abstract theory, and new only in so far as they become actual possessions and active principles of conduct. Happiness, he discovered, was to be found by not aiming at happiness; by working for some external end and not meditating upon your own feelings. And, secondly, he discovered the importance of cultivating those sympathies and sentiments which he had previously been inclined to despise as mere encumbrances to his reasoning machinery. But do not the two doctrines clash? Is not an Æsthetic cultivation of happiness a name for that introspective brooding of which Rousseau is the great example, implying precisely that thirst for happiness as an ultimate end and aim which his other principles showed to be suicidal? Consciously to cultivate the emotions is to become a sentimentalist—the very thing which he was anxious to renounce. The apparent paradox was solved for him by the help of Wordsworth, who taught him that the charm of tranquil contemplation might be heightened instead of dulled by a vivid interest in the common feelings and common destinies of human beings; and that Æsthetic delight in nature was perfectly compatible with scientific interest in its laws. The famous ode proved to him that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment could be replaced by a wider interest in our fellows; and that the thoughts which gather round the setting sun are not something distinct from, but really identical with, those suggested by a watch over man's mortality. This teaching, he says, dispersed for ever his youthful depression.

The problem seems a simple one when thus stated. How to cultivate your feelings without becoming sentimental? Find your happiness in the happiness of others; and regard even the grinding of that logical mill as work done for the benefit of your kind. Problems, however, which have to be worked out by modifying your own character take a good deal more labour than is implied in putting together a couple of syllogisms. And it is in this modification of character that the peculiar interest of the autobiography consists. The aversion of his mind from his own private interests, the intense devotion of his mental energies to what he regarded as the great needs of his fellow-men, the constant reference of his apparently most abstract speculation to practical reforms, are obvious and most honourable characteristics of Mill as a thinker. One may doubt whether women will be as much improved by receiving votes as he anticipated; one cannot doubt the generosity with which he revolted against their supposed 'subjection.' But there is another sense in which this theory of the vast importance of 'extra-regarding' habits brings out some curious results. We are all such adepts at self-deception that we need not wonder if the very resolution not to think of oneself sometimes tends to a more refined kind of self-consciousness. I have often fancied that nobody can be so dogmatic as your thoroughly candid person. The fact that he has listened to all sides gives him a kind of right in his own opinion to speak with the authority of a judge. It has been said that a tendency to be 'cock-sure' is a special characteristic of Mill's school; and perhaps we may recognise it in their master not the less because it is combined with a scrupulous desire to grant a hearing to all antagonists. But another manifestation of character is more interesting. No one could be more anxious than Mill to arrogate nothing to himself. Nobody could state more explicitly that his merit was less in original thought than in willingness to learn from others, and thus that his true function was to mediate between the public and the original thinkers. And therefore it is natural to find him insisting with passionate eagerness upon the superlative merits of the woman who was, according to him, the guide of his mature years, as his father had been of his infancy and youth. Here was the practical commentary on the text of cultivating the emotions. If he withdrew from society and many social enjoyments, it was because his whole emotional strength was concentrated upon a single object. We listen with some mixture of feeling to his rather strained and exalted eulogy. It may be true that Mrs. Mill was more of a poet than Carlyle, and more of a thinker than Mill himself; that she was like Shelley, but that Shelley was but a child to what she ultimately became; that her wisdom was 'all but unrivalled,' and much more to the same purpose. It may, I say, be true, for one cannot prove a negative in regard to a person of whom the world knows so little. Yet it is a weakness, though an amiable weakness, to attempt, by force of such language, to overcome the inevitable decree of circumstances, and to try to dictate to the world an opinion which it cannot receive upon any single authority. It may be profoundly melancholy that such exalted merit should vanish without leaving more tangible traces; but it is useless to resent the fact, or to suppose that when such traces are non-existent, the defect can be supplied by the most positive assertions that they might have existed. And Mill would have seen in any other case what was the inevitable suggestion to his readers. He could not, he says, 'detect any mixture of errors' in the truths which she struck out far in advance to him. What are the opinions in which a man detects no mixture of error? Plainly his own. But these were far in advance of him. That means that they were deductions from his own. Is it possible, to speak it plainly, to resist a strong impression that these extravagant expressions of admiration may have been lavished upon a living echo—an echo, it is true, skilful enough to anticipate as well as to repeat, but still essentially an echo? We know, for Mill has told us, what he did alone, and we know what he did in co-operation; and if the earlier work was not his best, it certainly contained the whole sum and substance of his later teaching. That his wife must have been a remarkable woman may be a fair deduction from his admiration; that she was all that he then thought her would be, to say the least of it, a very rash conjecture.

Happiness, says Mill, is to be found by aiming at something different from happiness. And if we thus cheat ourselves into happiness, we may attain to the vanity of self-esteem by a similar expedient. By lavishing all our enthusiasm upon one who is but a second self, we may deprive our appreciation of our own merits of its apparent arrogance. This, indeed, is one of the many illusions which give a peculiar interest to the unconscious confessions of autobiographers. But neither is it to be roughly set down as an illusion, and still less as an unworthy sentiment. It in no sort diminishes our interest in discovering that this so-called reasoning machine was a man of the most delicate fibre and most tender affections. It is easy to forgive the illusions against which a thick cuirass of tough selfishness is the only known safeguard of complete efficacy. Rather it helps to convince us that Mill should be classed in some respects with the unworldly enthusiasts of the Vicar of Wakefield type whose very simplicity leads them to a harmless vanity which exaggerates their own infallibility and importance to the world. He had the character, though not the crotchets, of the life-long recluse. Though his intellect was deeply interested in the great problems of contemporary thought, and though he had been for many years in State affairs, there was a wall of separation between himself and his contemporary society. When he came into Parliament he came as re-entering the world from a remote hermitage. Hermits, whether they come from deserts or from the India Office, have a certain tendency to intolerance and contempt for the social part of the species. They have lost some human feeling and preach crusades with a reckless indifference to consequences. I cannot determine how far Mill might be rightly accused of a want of practical sense. But in any case he had nothing of the bitterness or the harsh pedantry of the solitary theorist. Even his enemies could see that his sympathies were fresh and generous, and that his impulses were invariably generous. As a philanthropist, his philanthropy was not of the merciless and inhuman variety. The discovery of the fact was a surprise at the time to those who believed in the traditional Benthamite and Malthusian. The autobiography, with its strange bursts of emotion, perhaps reveals the true secret. If he naturally exaggerated the merits of the partner of his hermitage, he did not necessarily exaggerate her services to him. It is easily credible that her company saved him from ossifying into a mere grinder of formulÆ and syllogisms. We shrink a little from certain over-strung phases, but they reveal to us the pathos of the man's life. Admit that his affection produced illusion, or that it covered and was combined with a sort of vicarious self-conceit, yet at bottom it represents the intense devotion which springs only out of simplicity and tenderness of nature.

It would be tempting here to draw the obvious parallel between Mill and Carlyle, which must just now be in everyone's mind; for certainly whatever may be said of the 'Reminiscences' just published, they contain one of the most remarkable self-revelations ever given to the world, and the relations of the two men to vigorous fathers and passionately adored wives have singular points of contrast and resemblance. But I must be content to close this ramble through some famous autobiographies by touching upon one which often seems to me to be the most delightful of its class. I know, as everybody knows, what may be said against Gibbon: against his want of high enthusiasm, his deficient sympathy with the great causes and their heroes, the provoking self-sufficiency and apparent cold-bloodedness of the fat composed little man. And yet, when reading his autobiography and contrasting it with some of those we have considered, I find myself constantly led to a conclusion not quite in accordance with the proper rules of morality. After all, one cannot help asking, did not Gibbon succeed in solving the problem of life more satisfactorily than almost anybody one knows? Other autobiographies are for the most part records of hard struggles with fate, plaintive lamentations over the inability to obtain any solid satisfaction out of life, appeals of disappointed vanity to the judgment of an indifferent posterity, vain-glorious braggings over successes which should rather have been the cause of shame, weak regrets for the vanishing pleasures of youth and hopeless attempts to make the might-have-been pass muster with the actual achievement. The more a man prides himself upon his successes, the more we feel how good a case a rival's advocate could make on the other side: and when he laments over his failures, the more we are inclined to say that after all it served him right. But when in imagination we take that famous turn with Gibbon upon that terrace at Lausanne beneath the covered walk of acacias, gaze upon the serene moon and the silent lake, and hear him soliloquise upon the conclusion of the 'Decline and Fall,' we feel that we are in presence of a man who has a right to his complacency. He has not aimed, perhaps, at the highest mark, but he has hit the bull's-eye. Given his conception of life, he has done his task to perfection. With singular felicity, he has come at the exact moment and found the exact task to give full play to his powers. Nobody had yet laid the keystone in the great arch of history; and he laid it so well that his work can never be superseded. Somebody defines a life to be une pensÉe de jeunesse exÉcutÉe par l'Âge mÛr. It was Gibbon's singular good fortune to illustrate that saying as few men have done. Though his plan ripened slowly and with all deliberation, he acted as if he had foreseen the end from the beginning. If he had been told in his boyhood, You shall live so long a life, with such and such means at your disposal, he could hardly have laid out his life differently. To mistake neither one's powers nor one's opportunities is a felicity which happens to few; and Gibbon had the additional good fortune that even his distractions seem to have been useful. The interruption to his Oxford education made him a cosmopolitan; his service with the volunteers helped him to be a military historian; and even his parliamentary career, which threatened to absorb him, only gave to the student the tone of a practical politician. It seems as though everything had been expressly combined to make the best of him.

What more could be desired by a man of Gibbon's temperament? Undoubtedly to be a man of Gibbon's temperament is to have a moderate capacity for certain forms of happiness. In the lives of most great men the history of a conversion is a record of heart-rending struggle, ending in hard-won peace. Gibbon merely changed his religion as he changed his opinion upon some antiquarian controversy; it is a question as to the weight of historical evidence, like the question about the sixth Æneid, or a dispute about the genealogy of the house of Brunswick. Whatever pangs and raptures may require religious susceptibility were clearly not within his range of feeling. And in another great department of feeling we need not inquire into the character of the author of the inimitable sentence, 'I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.' One is tempted to put it beside a remark which he makes on another occasion, 'I yielded to the authority of a parent, and complied, like a pious son, with the wish of my own heart.' Perhaps the heart which sanctioned his filial obedience in the latter case was not so opposed to it in the other as he would have us believe. It is better worth noting, however, that, in spite of the very tepid disposition illustrated by these familiar passages, Gibbon has affections as warm as are compatible with thorough comfort. He was not a passionate lover; and we cannot say, for he was not tried, that his friendship was of an heroic strain; but he had a very good supply of such affections as are wanted for the ordinary wear and tear of life—to provide a man with enough interests and sympathies to make society pleasant, and his family life agreeable. Nay, he seems to have been really generous and considerate beyond the ordinary pitch, and to have been a faithful friend, and excellent in some very delicate relationships. For a statesman, a religious teacher, or a poet, much stronger equipment in this direction might be desirable. But Gibbon had warmth enough to keep up a pleasant fireside, if not enough to fire the hearts of a nation. He clearly had enough passion for his historical vocation. A more passionate and imaginative person would hardly have written it at all. It requires a certain moderation of character to be satisfied with a history instead of a wife, and Gibbon was so great an historian because he could accept such a substitute. No one capable of being a partisan could have preserved that stately march and equable development of the vast drama of human affairs which gives a monumental dignity to his great book. Even if you do not want to write another 'Decline and Fall,' is not such a disposition the most enviable of gifts? If such a life has less vivid passages, is there not something fascinating about that calm, harmonious existence, disturbed by no spasmodic storms, and yet devoted to one achievement grand enough to extort admiration even from the least sympathetic? Surely it is a happy mean; enough genius to be in the front rank, if not in the highest class, and yet that kind of genius which has no affinity to madness or disease, and virtue enough to keep up to the respectable level which justifies a comfortable self-complacency without suggesting any awkward deviations in the direction of martyrdom. That is surely the kind of composition which a man might desire if he were to calculate what character would give him the best chance of extracting the greatest possible amount of enjoyment out of life. Luckily for the world, if not for its heroes, men's characters cannot be fixed by such calculations; and a certain number of perverse people are even glad to possess vehement emotions and restless intellects, however conscious that the fiery soul will wear out the pigmy body. We try to persuade ourselves that they are not only choosing the noblest part, but acting most wisely for their own interests. It may be so; for the problem is a complex one. But it has not yet been proved that a man can always make the best of both worlds, and that the sacrifices imposed by virtue are always repaid in this life. Certainly it seems doubtful, when we have studied the self-written records of remarkable men, whether experience will confirm that pleasant theory; whether it is not more probable that for simple employment it is not best to have one's nature pitched in a key below the highest. Most of us would make a very fair compromise if we should abandon our loftier claims on condition of being no worse than Gibbon.