Читать книгу My Life - Havelock Ellis - Страница 4

Table of Contents

I wrote it in a leisurely fashion. It seemed to me that in transcribing, with the most delicate precision I was capable of, the process of my growth and progress through life, I was occupied in a task to which only my finest moments should be given. The record was thus slowly set down during a few days of the best summer weeks every year at Carbis Bay, as I reclined on the moor, reserving, without premeditation, one choice and special spot on Sunday mornings for this occupation. There seemed no need for haste, life was still spread spaciously ahead. With this careful choice of time and place the narrative moved so slowly that at the end of some fifteen years I had not advanced beyond the period of adolescence. Then my wife died and the space of life before me seemed suddenly to contract. It became clear that I must speed up my task. I made a fresh start from the time of my marriage, and I wrote the two sections of the narrative concurrently. Moreover, I wrote at much more frequent intervals, though I still chose my finest moments to write, for if I had from the first taken this record seriously as the most perdurable piece of work I was likely to leave behind, a new sacredness was now infused into it.

With the course of years, however, my conception of the method of my task, though not of its aim, had become modified. I had started with the idea, which I still retain, that of all forms of prose, outside the limits of imaginative art, there is no form so precious in its nature and so permanent in its value as autobiography. But in this form, as I understood it, there were few productions that deserved to rank high. Adequately rendered, the Pilgrim's Progress of the soul through life should be as fascinating, even as noble a record, as Bunyan's and still more instructive. Yet of how few can this be said! It cannot even be said of Bunyan's own autobiography, while nearly all the lives written in my time, by their subjects or about them, were loathsome in their falsity or unprofitable in their emptiness. Even when I viewed the whole range of such works, the Confessions of St. Augustine, the Confessions of Rousseau, the Memoirs of Casanova could alone be placed at the summit, though I recognised that each of these is open to criticism, while there are some half dozen other autobiographical documents of high value, often, indeed, little if at all inferior in quality to these first three. Of all these documents Rousseau's Confessions had always come before me—in spite of all the objection brought by the great army of little scribblers—as a model in their kind.

Yet slowly, very slowly, even before I had made much progress in my task, I realised that I could not take Rousseau, or indeed anyone else, as my model. Rousseau, Augustine, Casanova had each in his own special way attained the perfection of more or less sincere intimacy in the record of his individual life and produced a narrative of immortal value and interest. But Rousseau had been stimulated by the exquisite torture of his need for self-justification, and Augustine had been carried away by the self-abandonment of religious emotion, and Casanova by a certain audacious moral obtusity. I was conscious of no such grounds for self-revelation. The very qualities, indeed, of sanity and reasonableness, of critical impartiality, of just analytic precision, which made the task fascinating and possible for me, were incompatible with those qualities which had assured the success of Rousseau and Augustine and Casanova, not one of whom had so much as conceived the scientific spirit applied to life. Moreover, even if I were to set down the exact facts of my life in the scientific impersonal spirit not impossible for me, I should still have to encounter the insuperable prejudices of my contemporaries. All literature is a perpetual struggle. Every morning the writer who is truly alive must conquer afresh the liberty of expression. At his heels is the compact army organised by convention and prudery, ready at any moment to thrust aside or trample down every straggler. It so happens, also, that for a long time past, some two centuries or more, my own country and some others have been passing through a phase of timidity in self-expression, the outward sign of an increased literary emasculation. It has been impossible to set down clearly the most vital facts of life, or always even the most trivial, because they seemed not to accord with that drawing-room standard of good taste which generally ruled. Under such conditions no immortal book can ever be written, and I suppose that our prose literature of this period—for the criteria of poetry may be different—will be as tedious and unprofitable to posterity as it is already becoming to ourselves. I cannot accept this standard of taste. Yet I must necessarily write as a child of my own time. It has thus come about that I have had to find my own personal way of telling my own life, a way that is sincere without being crude, a way that tells all that is essential to tell and yet leaves many things to be read, clearly enough by intelligent readers, between the lines. It is not the way I had proposed, it is not an easy way, yet it seems, on the whole, to be my way, and I think that, if need were, I could justify it.

There has been selection in my narrative. In every such narrative there is inevitably selection, and often it is far from being stringent enough. But too often it is a reverent selection by which the insignificant things are recorded and the significant things suppressed. I am indeed concerned mainly with my inner life; I have no wish to write anything but a spiritual biography, and outer events only interest me here in so far as they affected my inner life. I have sought to select the significant things. That requires a certain daring and a certain fortitude, just as much if one happens to be a saint as if one happens to be a sinner, though that is rather a conventional distinction since most people are, at the same time or at different times, saints when seen from one angle and sinners from another. No doubt it requires also a certain skill, if one is to tell the essential truth at every point to discerning readers and yet avoid the various risks of truth-telling. I have at least sought to be fair and never to suppress anything, however shameful it might seem to some, which signifies. I have not left it possible for any persons, however miraculously informed, to come forward to discredit my narrative by the revelation of significant facts I had suppressed. Except for the beautiful and prolonged episode of my closing years, which is too near to me to write about, I have left nothing significant of my life untold. No doubt, some shocked old-fashioned prude will comment: "I should hope not!"

Those who in writing of their own lives concern themselves mainly with outer events are, it would seem, largely moved by vanity, and the outcome is often harmless and agreeable. The motive that seems to have been influential with me—apart from the fundamental impulse of self-expression which may well be deeper—is the desire that my experience of life may help those who come after me to live their own lives. From the age of sixteen at least that motive has been strong, almost instinctive, within me. Certainly and consciously, the leading motive which induced me to take up the chief work of my life was the wish that others might be spared some of the difficulties I had to contend with. That, it may be said, hardly justifies me in extending the same unsparing frankness to the record of my wife's life. I believe, nevertheless, that—sensitively independent as she was—I may now venture to speak for her as well as for myself. Her wisdom of life, as she remarked to an acquaintance during her last week in the world, had been the outcome especially of her experience with me. She desired to help others, she often succeeded in helping others, and she never spared herself, although during the best part of her life she was not without a certain shrewdness and caution, as well as personal reserve. But I knew what her unfulfilled plans and aims were, and I knew that, even as regards the deep-lying anomaly of temperament which meant so much in her character and work, it was one of her dearest wishes to bring light and consolation to others. Now there is nothing left to do but what I have done, in the belief that she would understand and approve, or, at the least, forgive.

I know there are some who exclaim on the indecency of publishing intimate letters which were never written to be published. The love-letters of the Brownings have been used to exploit the indignation of the superior people who make this protest. I have looked into those letters; they were all written before marriage by two people who had never had any opportunity of being intimate; they might all, as my wife once exclaimed in a different connection of a letter she had herself written, have been stuck up on the stable door. But if one publishes letters that once really were intimate? What can it matter when we are both dead? Who can be hurt, if she and I, who might once have been hurt, are now only a few handfuls of ashes flung over the grass and the flowers? To do what I have done here has been an act of prolonged precision in cold blood, beyond anything else that I have ever written. For I know that, to a large extent, the world is inhabited by people to whom one does too much honour by calling them fools. The cost has been great, but I have counted the cost. All mankind may now, if they will, conspire together to hurt us. We shall not feel it. We shall still be in the soft air that bathes them and in the blossoms that burst into beauty beneath their feet. Nothing matters to us who are dead. But we may perhaps have brought a little help and consolation to those who are still alive, and sensitive and suffering.

I have no more to say by way of prelude except to make clear that the period of life I have sought to record is that which covers what I have always regarded as my life-work, the period of struggle and of perpetual advance towards a desired goal. With the completion of that task and, a little later, the loss of that comrade who had been throughout so loyally at my side, the narrative ends. All that matters has been told.

But I do not by any means imply that therewith my life was ended. Far from it! Life has never been so beautiful to me as it has become since I could peacefully lay the burden of my accomplished life-work down. With the tension of an unachieved task no longer felt, with a widespread recognition of the significance of that achievement such as I had never even hoped for, with a comparative freedom from anxieties, with loving and lovely friends among those it has seemed to me the best people in the world, above all, with the constant companionship of one who has been a perpetual source of comfort and joy, I can say with truth that the last phase of my life has been the happiest.

To say this is also to say that this book is not a mere personal revelation. If it were I should never have written it. I do not come forward to say: "This was the real Me—that was the real She." So to do would merely be to display an indiscretion of intimacy from which the modest reader might desire to turn aside as not concerning him. I say what cannot fail to concern him: "This is life." It is an impersonal revelation which I uncover, and had it been possible I would use symbols for all proper names, including my own. The narrative that holds a true picture of life should be helpful to many, and it has seemed to me that when it represents what may on nearer view seem failure and yet on far view supreme success, it is helpful to all. For novels do not bring to us real life. They inevitably seek to transform life into art, to beautify it or perhaps to uglify it. When one is not concerned with artistic representation there is no need to do either. For life itself bolds all the beauty we can conceive, with all the ugliness, and weaves them together into a final harmony. It is in the desire by self expression to help others that I find the chief reason for this record; and even though, deeper than that, the heart, as Pascal says, has its reasons, that reason may suffice.

The stuff of our lives is, indeed, a tangled web, yet in the end there is order. It may be long before order becomes clear, for life, when we reach below the surface, is full of complexity and full of contradictions. Thus it has taken me long to find out whether I am of weak or of strong character; I have seemed to those who knew me both the one and the other, and could myself find reasons on either side. But one might ask the same unprofitable question of the water or the wind. I see now that weakness and strength are only names for two necessary aspects of any possible approach, however humble, towards perfection. The man who seems, and he merely seems, all strength is as far from success as the man who seems all weakness may be from failure. Indeed, the whole question of success and failure is of the same blended kind. What from one point of view is tragic failure may from another angle be magnificent success, of which the story of Jesus is the immortal symbol. In the sphere of the practical and in that of the spiritual, the Napoleons of the world and the Beethovens of the world tell the same story of success that was failure, of failure that was success. I know too well my own inefficiency; it has weighed on me from youth and the disasters I have met have proved greater than even the melancholy of youth could forbode. My life has sometimes seemed a path to Calvary trodden with bleeding feet. Yet the roses of immortal beauty have blossomed wherever I trod. I have tasted the joys of Heaven on every side. The peace that passes all understanding has dwelt at my heart. The life-work I planned in youth I have achieved through half a century—together with the power it has brought to help and to console—in a measure that surpasses my dreams. And now at the threshold of old age the precious unsought balms of love and devotion, almost of worship, that are poured on my head are a perpetual miracle I can only receive with humility, if not with awe. On the foundation of much failure is built success, and there is no defeat left for him who is no longer conscious of defeat. With simplicity and love in one's heart, with truth to one's own deepest natural instincts, we may touch the world where we will and it bursts into radiant beauty. That surely is enough for anyone.

It is certainly enough for me. I have never had ambition as that word is usually understood, and I have never desired praise, nor received more than a moderate satisfaction when it came to me, just as, on the other hand, I have been indifferent, if not indeed contemptuous, to blame. The attentions of the world, I have found, embarrass more than they flatter. I have been a dreamer and an artist, a great dreamer for that is easy, not a great artist for that is hard, but still always an artist, whether in the minor art of writing, or the greater art of comprehending, or the supreme art of living, wherein it is something to have tried even if one fails. So that if I am often sad—for the art of living is finally the art of loving, in which one becomes a master too late—I am always content.

For I have always been instinctively attracted to what is difficult, even in my relations with those I have loved.

HAVELOCK ELLIS