The Secret Life

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Elizabeth Bisland. The Secret Life

June 21. L'Enfant Terrible

July 7. An Optimistic Cynic

July 20. A Poet Sheep-rancher

September 4. An Eaten Cake

September 12. Concerning Elbows on the Table

October 14. An Autumn Impulse

November 1. John-a'-Dreams

November 6. The Fountain of Salmacis

November 20. Two Siegfrieds

January 6. A Door Ajar

January 7. At Time of Death

January 10. The Curse of Babel

January 14. The Fourth Dimension

January 23. The Ant and the Lark

January 29. The Döppelganger

February 17 "A Young Man's Fancy."

February 18. An Arabian Looking-glass

March 4. The Cry of the Women

May 4. Seville. The Beauty of Cruelty

May 7. Granada. The Duke of Wellington's Trees

May 15. Naples. The Boy with the Goose

May 30. Rome. A God Indeed

June 1. A Question of Skulls

London. June 30. The Modern Woman and Marriage

July 17. The Ideal Husband

July 23. A New Law of Health

July 24 "Dead, Dead, Dead."

September 6. Verbal Magic

October 8. Hamlet

December 13. Ghosts

December 20. Amateur Saints

January 1, 1900. The Zeitgeist

February 11. The Abdication of Man

June 13. Life

July 2. Portable Property

July 10. Are American Parents Selfish?

July 30. A Question of Heredity

October 6. The Little Dumb Brother

August 5. Fever Dreams

September 7. A Misunderstood Moralist

September 10. The Pleasures of Pessimism

September 18. Moral Pauperism

September 30. On a Certain Lack of Humour in Frenchmen

October 15. The Value of a Soul

A Grateful Spaniard

October 16. Bores

November 7. Emotions and Oxydization

November 10. Abelard to Heloise

Heloïse to Abelard

November 30. Yumei Mujitsu

December 1. The Real Thing

December 15 "Oh, Eloquent, Just, and Mighty Death."

December 23 "Philistia, be Thou Glad of Me."

December 24 "Oh King Live Forever!"

January 1. The Little Room

January 2. Aftermath

Отрывок из книги

Amiel's Journal: – I have been reading it with the half impatient interest which such books always arouse – in me at least. It is a more agreeable book, however, than Marie Bashkirtseff's disingenuous posings, or Rousseau's vulgar, insulting confidences. One is impatient with the bore who talks about himself when one is impatient to bore him about one's own self, and yet, somehow, one is fascinated by the hope of getting behind the mask of personality.

I learned to read French that I might possess the contents of the "Confessions." George Eliot called it the most interesting book she knew, which fired my ambition to read it. With the aid of a dictionary, the four great volumes were got through somehow, and when the task was accomplished, though I loathed Rousseau, I had enough French to serve roughly for both reading and speech.

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Heredity is an overworked jade, too often driven in double harness with a hobby; but the link between generation and generation is so strong and so close that none may lightly tell all the strands of which it is woven, nor from whence were spun the threads that tie us to the past. It is very certain, despite the theories of Weismann, that the acquired characteristics of the parent may be transmitted to the child. The boy whose father walked the quarter-deck is, nine times out of ten, as certain to head for salt water as a seagull born in a hen's nest. The victim of ill-fortune and prisoner of despair who breaks the jail of life to escape fate's malice leaves a dark tendency in the blood of his offspring, which again and again proves the terrible power of an inherited weakness. Women who lose their mind or become clouded in thought at childbirth – though they come of a stock of mens sana– transmit the blight of insanity to their sons and daughters both; and not only consumptive tendencies and the appetite for drink are acquired in a lifetime and then handed on for generations, but preferences, talents, manners, personal likeness – all may be the wretched burden or happy gift handed down to the son by the father. Who can say without fear of contradiction that the memories of passions and emotions that stirred those dead hearts to their centre may not be a part of our inheritance? The setting, the connection, is gone, but the memory of the emotion remains. Such and such nerves have quivered violently for such or such a cause – the memory stores and transmits the impression, and a similar incident sets them tingling again, though two generations lie between.

Certainly animals possess very distinctly these inherited memories. A young horse never before beyond the paddock and stables will fall into a very passion of fear when a snake crosses his path, or when driven upon a ferry to cross deep, swift water. He is entirely unfamiliar with the nature of the danger, but at some period one of his kind has sweated and throbbed in hideous peril, and the memory remains after the lapse of a hundred years. He, no more than ourselves, can recall all the surrounding circumstances of that peril, but the threatening aspect of a similar danger brings memory forward with a rush to use her stored warning. When the migrating bird finds its way without difficulty, untaught and unaccompanied, to the South it has never seen, we call its guiding principle instinct – but what is the definition of the word instinct? No man can give it. It but removes the difficulty one step backward. Call this instinct an inherited memory and the matter becomes clear. Such memories, it is plain, are more definite with the animals than with us; but so are many of their faculties, hearing, smell, and sight.

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