Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/184

 174 too deeply permeating and satisfactory for outward laughter. So Ruskin's inordinate vanity in "Præterita" cannot detract from the iridescent beauties of that marvelous book; it seems rather to be the guarantee of truthfulness.

Whatever may be your prepossessions, you cannot travel far in the field of biography without recognizing the value, even if you do not feel the fascination, of autobiographies, of which in English we have a particularly rich collection. I have spoken of Franklin's, to which Gibbon's may serve as a pendant. It discloses the eighteenth-century cosmopolite, placid, rational, industrious, a consummate genius in one direction, but of tepid emotion; who immortalized in a single line his betrothal which he docilely broke at his father's bidding: "I sighed as a lover," he writes, "but I obeyed as a son."

Halfway between the man of pure intellect, like Franklin and Gibbon, and the man of sentiment, comes John Stuart Mill, in whom the precocious development of a very remarkable mind did not succeed in crushing out the religious craving or the life of the feelings. Newman's "Apologia," largely occupied in the vain endeavor to transfuse the warm blood of the emotions into the hardened arteries of theological dogmas, stands at the other extreme in this class of confessions.

Contrast with it John Woolman's "Journal," the austerely sincere record of a soul that does not spend its time in casuistical interpretations of the quibbles propounded by mediæval theologians, but dwells consciously in the immediate presence of the living God.

Our only quarrel with Woolman is that, owing to his complete other-worldiness, he disdains to tell us facts about himself and about his time that we would gladly hear.

In other fields there is equal abundance. Many soldiers have written memoirs; enough to cite General Grant's, to parallel which we must go back to Cæsar's "Commentaries." Authors, poets, men of affairs, the obscure and the conspicuous, have voluntarily opened a window for us. From Queen Victoria's "Leaves from a Journal," to Booker T. Washington's "Up from Slavery," what contrasts, what richness, what range!