Page:Memoirs of a revolutionist volume 1.djvu/9

 PREFACE

THE Autobiographies which we owe to great minds have in former times generally been of one of three types: ‘So far I went astray, thus I found the true path’ (St. Augustine); or, ‘So bad was I, but who dares to consider himself better!’ (Rousseau) ; or, ‘This is the way a genius has slowly been evolved from within and by favourable surroundings ’ (Goethe). In these forms of self-representation the author is thus mainly pre-occupied with himself.

In the nineteenth century the autobiographies of men of mark are more often shaped on lines such as these: ‘So full of talent and attractive was I; such appreciation and admiration I won!’ (Johanne Louise Heiberg, ‘ A Life lived once more in Reminiscence’) ; or, ‘I was full of talent and worthy of being loved, but yet I was unappreciated, and these were the hard struggles I went through before I won the crown of fame ’(Hans Christian Andersen, ‘The Tale of a Life’). The main pre-occupation of the writer, in these two classes of life-records, is consequently with