Читать книгу Autobiography of a Cad - A. G. Macdonell - Страница 3

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I, who write this little book, am in my fiftieth year. For I was born in 1889 and I am writing in 1938. But I am only presenting to you the story of the first thirty-eight years of my life. That is to say, it is in 1926 that I come before the curtain at the end of my performance, to receive your applause, your derision, or your execration, whichever you will. For myself, it is equal, as our French friends say. Cheers, laughs, or hisses, are all one to me. It is a long time since I was touched or moved by the opinions of the herd.

But a reason is owed to you for this apparently arbitrary selection of dates. Why do you not bring your story down to 1938? it may well be asked. Why break off just at the moment when the world is a-tiptoe to follow your life and career down to its latest moment?

But there is a reason. I do not suppose that a high sense of artistic rightness is implanted deep in the bosom of everyone. But, on the other hand, no one was ever less ready than myself to claim a monopoly of such a sense. There must be a few others, scattered here and there, if one only knew where to look for them, who also have this fine appreciation of what may be called Symmetry. The modern style is slipshod. No one takes the trouble nowadays to tell a story, to tie up loose ends, to build an arch in which every stone falls truly and certainly into its predestined place so that a thing of symmetrical beauty is left at the end. But those of us who have clung to the classical tradition think otherwise.

I chose the year nineteen hundred and twenty-six as the end of my story, because it represented the climax of a symmetrical story. It was in the month of May of that year that I dropped, gently but with what an exquisite accuracy, the keystone into my arch so that my arch stood graceful and strong against whatever storm might blow. Beginning with no influence, with no title, with the handicap of parents who were obsessed by an inferiority complex, with a hatful of inherited disadvantages such as the unpopularity of my father for his political views and the tradition of commercial vulgarity left behind him by my grandfather, and, above all, with the dead-weight of provincialism which life in the Midlands, unmitigated by the possession of a town house, inevitably hung round my youthful neck, nevertheless I fought clear of it all.

Single-handed, by my own unaided efforts, after years of laborious toil, and endless planning and thinking ahead, I overcame every obstacle and, in the year 1926, rounded off a tale of farsighted endeavour with a series of triumphs that placed me upon the top of the world. No third son on the last page of a fairy story was ever manœuvred by the Fairy Queen into such a position of commanding success as I had reached in that year. Only I needed no Fairy Queen, and certainly no manœuvres, whether of hers or of anyone else’s. All that was necessary for me was my own talent, supported and encouraged by my own exertions.

That is why I have closed my tale on my thirty-eighth year. The whole romance of “from pit-boy to Cabinet” is contained in those years, so why spoil a work of art, however fascinating it may be, by continuing it after the essential effect has been achieved?

It is usually an act of vanity to assume that the world is sufficiently interested in one’s personality to spend twelve-and-six on one’s autobiography. Nowadays autobiographers either begin early in life and describe their reactions to daffodils, and Greek statues of boys, and God, and the Oxford Union, and the rugged kindliness of their dear old father, and so on, or else they wait till they are ninety and babble of crinolines, and the Tranby Croft scandal, and what Cardinal Newman thought of Disestablishment. Both of these types are consumed with vanity. They really think that an elegant dislike of calceolarias, or a recollection of John Brown’s repartee to Queen Victoria outside Crathie Church on an autumnal afternoon in 1878, is the sort of thing which the world wants to know. But for myself, I am not concerned with vanity. It is not, and never has been, one of my weaknesses. After all, vanity can never go hand in hand with clarity of vision. The two are incompatible. And by clarity of vision, of course, I mean that clarity which not merely understands and dissects the foolish and comic and pathetic world about us, but which turns inwards and enables a man to understand himself.

Nor am I writing this book to make money. Few people of this materialistic, nay, hedonistic, age of ours have cared less for money than I have. It has meant very little to me, except as a commodity to exchange for the odds and ends which have from time to time constituted my small wants. Besides, I have always had plenty of it.

Nor again is it celebrity that I am seeking. When you have read through to the end—and in all modesty I make no doubt that those of you who have reached as far as this will find it difficult to put the volume down, as sycophantic reviewers so often say, until you have finished it—you will find that before the end of my thirty-eighth year sufficient celebrity had come my way without the necessity of seeking more.

Why then am I telling you my story?

The reason is because it contains a moral which it might be to the advantage of the growing generations to examine. These growing generations have had all too seldom a sheet-anchor on which to depend in times of stress. Their world was knocked askew by the war, and by the fits and starts of the post-war years. They live too often upon sand. They have no standards.

It is only right, therefore, that a man like myself, who has not merely survived the slaughter of Armageddon, but has emerged from that cruel time of death and, worse, disillusion, with his ideals untarnished and his principles uncompromised, should place his conclusions at the service of those, less fortunate, who are groping in the dark.

In a word, the moral of these thirty-eight years of my life is that if you do what you think is right, you are bound to win. I do not mean that you are bound to win the ordinary, often sordid, prizes of the outward life. But I have proved, and I have written this book to show how I have proved, that if a man clings fast to what he believes to be the Right and the Truth, he cannot fail in the end to win the only prize which is worth winning, and that prize is Peace within himself. A consciousness of duty done, come what might, is worth far more than every other reward which Society can bestow. Shakespeare coined a phrase about “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves,” and Sir James Barrie gave it currency in a foolish play. The sentiment is all right, so far as it goes. But it should have been added that the merit is also in ourselves and not in our stars.