Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/183

 Rh THE VALUE OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY Autobiography is an important and often very precious product of biography. The common prejudice, that because it is egotistical it must be tedious, does not hold water. The impulse toward self-expression exceeds all others save the instinct of self-preservation. The artist blessed with great talent expresses himself through that talent, whether it be painting or sculpture, literature or eloquence. Let him strive never so hard to be impersonal, the tinge of his mind will color it; the work is his work. Men of pure science discover abstract laws by experimenting with material sterilized as far as possible from any taint due to a personal equation; but this does not lessen our interest in them as human beings. Far from it. We are all the more curious to learn how men, subject to our passions, contradictions and disabilities, have succeeded in exploring the passionless vastitudes of astronomy and the incomputably minute worlds of atoms and electrons. We rejoice to find Darwin worthy of being the prophet of a new dispensation—Darwin, the strong, quiet, modest man, harassed hourly by a depressing ailment, but patient under suffering, and preferring truth to the triumph of his own opinions or to any other reward. If self-conceit, or egotism, be rather too obtrusive in some autobiographies, you will learn to bear it if you regard it as a secretion apparently as necessary to the growth of certain talents as is the secretion which produces the pearl in the oyster. If a pearl results, the pearl compensates. And, after all, such conceit, like the make-believe of little children, is too patent to deceive us. It is the thought that they are trying to humbug us into supposing them greater than we know them to be that irritates us in the conceit of little men. But since conceited men have been great, even very great, although this blemish in them offends us, it ought not to blind us to their other positive accomplishments! And how much harmless amusement we owe to such unconscious humorists! When Victor Hugo grandly announces: "France is the head of civilization; Paris is the head of France; I am the brains of Paris," are we seized with a desire to refute him? Hardly. We smile an inward smile,