may be due to the horrible torments which | minds in compliment to his mind and perhe suffered when a child, from being taken son, who with tears of gratitude invoked to church in his nightcap as a punishment everlasting happiness to reward his emfor story-telling. The cause seems inadequate ployer's gift of a Sunday suit, and halfto so admirable an effect; but Italian cha-a-dozen pairs of beautiful stockings, and racter, versatile and exuberant, long after who drew cheques upon Providence and the other countries had contentedly sacrificed religious world which were sometimes rather individuality to systems, was not to be too near being dishonoured. Perhaps the swamped in the level current of modern pro- key to his character lies in a trait of his gress without a last remonstrance. The youth, when he used to tell lies to avoid interval between Alfieri and Goethe may, at the correction of a severe father, and then first sight, seem less wide than that which pray that they might not be found out. In separates Rousseau from Goldoni; but it is later life he ran into debt, and prayed for profounder and more final. The hereditary money to discharge his liabilities; and in self-confidence which lingers longest in the each case his prayers were so often heard castles of a rustic nobility carried the young that he forgot to repent of the preceding aristocrat, without loss of dignity, through offence against secular canons of morality. the crass ignorance of his boyhood and the But without this peculiarity his Autobiograromantic extravagance of his youth, harmo- phy might have been tedious, as indeed it nizes with the writings of his maturity, and becomes as his years and income increase. emboldens him, at the age of forty-eight, In the early and more poetical chapters, the to encounter the difficulties of the Greek mild and apparently modest youth has realgrammar and alphabet. Where Goethe ly more in common with the placid arrogance breaks hearts with idyllic tearfulness, Alfieri of the Chevalier de Grammont than with the crosses swords, a pure hero of melodrama. slightly fatiguing good faith of ordinary Whilst the German accepts gratefully the religious diaries. favour and honours of a petty Court, the Italian reconciles his habits and the rights of man by allowing his servants to return his cuffs, and by making it a principle not to cane them as a superior, but only to throw chairs and boots at their heads as an angry fellow-mortal. The story of Count Mirabeau and his lacquey shows that such a piece of self-conquest is not to be despised; but the fact is nothing to the manner in which it is related. Alfieri is not a poet of the first rank; and the interest of his adventures may be matched by many; but in the confidence with which he tells his story, his indifference whether his narration may invite amusement or condemnation, above all, his assumption that whatever he has done needs no explanation, and scarcely any justification beyond the fact that he did it-in all this there is a degenerate heroism, a rudimentary positivism, which, whatever the defects of both material and style, are removed toto cœlo from the depressing irresolution of the metaphysical period in the history of ego

tism.

The Lebensgeschichte of Heinrich Jung is a connecting link between the religious memoir, which is always the same, and the sentimental autobiography of which Werther was soon to set the fashion. Written by Goethe's advice, the story of his woes and religious faith had a brilliant success; but it takes all the power of Goethe's name to make us believe in the sincerity of the tailorschoolmaster turned oculist, who wept tears of pity when young ladies went out of their

Autobiographies written for the sake of edification differ amongst each other less in substance and tenor than in the success with which the writer expresses real and genuine feelings as if they were original as well as real. Baxter gives us a reason for reticence touching the "heart occurrences" of his later years, that "God's dealings with his servants are the same in the main," and thinks it "unsavoury" to dwell too much on intimately personal matters; and his instinct is justified by the monotony of those religious memoirs which neither stop short with the crisis of the writer's spiritual history, nor yet have anything important to relate of his subsequent influence in the religious world. From the "Friends of God," in the fourteenth century, the Germans have always been fond of this class of autobiography. The difficulty of keeping up an active, conscious, religious life, without mysticism and without practical fields of labour, led that famous confraternity into dangerous reliance upon mysterious machinery and secret agencies for political or other proselytism; and with Francke and the later pietists its effect is simply to lower the standard of spiritual exaltation. The Covenanters of the seventeenth century have far more to say about their armed risings and the sins of their rulers than about their personal trials and temptations; and Veitch, Brysson, and Blackader throw more light on the history of their times than on their own characters, and less on either than a thoroughly original writer and politician

like Knox. But Knox had never leisure, | tical method and habit of mind, connect S. nor perhaps repose of mind enough, to add Augustine and Cellini, Marmontel and Pepys: an autobiography to his history; and the and the heterogeneous list, which should inage of Pepys is not represented amiss in clude all authors of the present century the field of religious autobiography by whose works contain autobiographical deRichard Baxter and George Fox. They are tails, avowed or easily recognisable, is held the two extremes of the movement which together by a common absorption in certain finds a faint and degenerate echo in the problems, by the use of similar methods for missionary journals of the first Methodists. their solution, and by the arrival at kindred Fox's Journal is perhaps the more able, cer conclusions, or at least by two out of the tainly the more imaginative, of the two; three possible points of contact. The egoand the touch of fanatic extravagance, which tism of introspective autobiography takes might be a drawback anywhere else, only several forms, but rarely one which can be serves here to give an air of genuineness to satisfied with the undiscriminating historical the story of the writer's conversion and candour of professed memoirs. For a man persecutions. It was a saying of his school- to describe his own character is to confess a fellows, "If George says Verily,' there is doubt whether his actions and his declared no moving him;" and in the most impor- opinions represent it fully and worthily; but tant qualification of self-confidence he yields to disclaim the description is in addition to neither to Stilling nor Cellini. It is imagi- admit a doubt, not merely whether the aunation vivid to the point of disease that led thor's real character, but whether his favourite him to see a material resemblance between idealized rendering of it, has the artistic prothe congregation of the "steeple-house" at priety without which it should not have been Nottingham and a "field of fallow-ground," made the subject of disquisitions in prose with the priest "like a great lump of earth" or verse. Shelley's Alastor and Laon are a standing in his pulpit above. The forms mixture of Shelley's notion of himself and taken by his horror of steeple-houses were his notion of perfection; and if the presence sometimes quaint in the extreme, the spires of the Shelleyan element is objected to as of Lichfield, in particular, moving him to a marring the abstract truth of the poems, the bona fide cross-country chase, which he poet is compelled to answer that the choice describes with great gusto: but it cannot of an ideal implies a tendency to approxibe denied that episodes of this sort do a mate to it. But Shelley's imagination would good deal to enliven the spread of Quakerism. have outlived his theories; and even before Baxter is more dignified, and, for the reason his intellect had rejected these, his taste above quoted, restricts himself to the history warned him off from the morbid portraiture of his labours and their success and hin- of a mere exaggerated second self in Prince drances, only resuming at intervals the Athanase. Byron, on the other hand, is a changes which he traces in his character. complete example of that curious developOf these the most notable was a steady in- ment of vanity which allows its victims to crease in tolerance, or, as his enemies said, wish to be admired not for what they are indifferentism—a slowness to proselytize, but for what they are not. The uniform arising partly from a respect for his neigh- character of his heroes, and the taste for bour's personality and conscience, and part- magnanimous mysterious misery which is ly from a belief in the impossibility of as- common to him and them, make it impossisting a soul in distress, except indirectly sible to take his word for their being altoand at the appointed time. gether independent creations. When the To class together Byron, Shelley, and Sé- poet, therefore, speaks in terms of condemnancour, Goethe, Newman, George Sand and nation of his favourite characters, the artifice the Guérins, may seem the reductio ad ab- is as transparent as when he appeals to the surdum of the chronological theory which mere difference of scenery as distinguishing connects them. But the step from Mac- himself from the Corsair or the Giaour. chiavelli to Montesquieu is exactly that from But this tergiversation is the least part of practice to theory, as the step from Alfieri his sins as an autobiographer. When Rousto Gibbon is that from action to thought; seau wished to pass for an example of antique and if we have already outlived the men virtue and primitive simplicity, he bought a who record dispassionately the arbitrary scratch-wig, sold his watch, and wore colourcourse of their lives, and those who repre- ed stockings, that he might be the more sent with truth and complacency the life of readily mistaken for a high-minded philoperiod or a class, nothing remains but to sopher; Schiller's Karl Moor really made misrepresent one or the other, or to represent converts to highway robbery; and Werther a relation or compromise between the two. provoked and prevented an appreciable numA similar intensity of character, or an iden- | ber of suicides. But Byron's ideal was not

definite enough for even its author to think | contentment; but, as the causes of his dis seriously of approaching it in practice. Without being inconsistent, it was incomplete. It asked too much from the imagination, whilst withholding all tangible food from that much-enduring faculty; and with the best intentions, his imitators could not find out exactly what it was they had had to do to their wives, their friends, or the laws of the land, before they would be entitled to look down with Manfred, Lara, and Childe Harold, upon the duties, pleasures, and concrete misfortunes of humanity. The only object held in view by the school was to reach a non-natural frame of mind, unmotived, objectless, and morally unfruitful. Werther, Réné, and Obermann are true by comparison. When Byron wrote, the days of piracy and lordly debauch were over. They had been weighed in the balance, and had been found wanting in beauty, use, and intrinsic propriety; to rehabilitate them as subjects of high art was an anachronism of which a poet with deeper imaginative insight would not have been guilty. Obermann, on the other hand still-still more Réné,-were, at the time of their appearance, new and genuine, even where weak and fantastical. With them ennui was more than a personal, half-formed sentiment of discontent; it was a positive and resentful protest against the action and the thought, the failures and the successes, of preceding generations. These young apostles of incurable melancholy passed in review nations, empires, and religions, life, death, and the unalterable conditions of existence; and in their summary condemnation of all and everything they were guided, not by principles which might be controverted, nor by experience which might be enlarged, but by a moral taste above discussion and above reason, as well as above sublunary satisfaction. The first step was taken when the private griefs of a Werther were set forth to be shared or compassionated by thousands of readers. But it was the sentiment, not its provocation, that enlisted sympathizers; and when Réné and Obermann ultimately failed to find relief, even in the indulgence of their melancholy, those who were conscious of having no specific to suggest for an abstract infinitude of unprovoked suffering accepted cynically all that could be urged against the natural order which in"cludes diseases without remedy.

content are internal, the new philosopher's stone, the idea of happiness, has to be developed out of the subjective moral consciousness of the seeker; and the most serious and lachrymose of pessimists hardly differs from Sir Walter Scott in estimating the success of the search. But this failure does not, like a mere political or controversial defeat, leave its subject disposed to claim his revenge at the bar of posterity. Neither personal nor literary amour propre is satisfied by proving a problem to be unanswerable, of which the first comer may dispute the premisses. The real Werthers have not energy to commit their sorrows to paper; and the few whom constitutional despondency really sends to a premature grave leave little mark upon their age, and at most have their memory preserved by a friendly and more favoured contemporary. If, like Chateaubriand and Goethe, the author outgrows the tendencies of his youthful representative, and writes an autobiography in form, there will still be reasons why it should not come up with the highest examples of the past. It is only another form of the fundamental scepticism of the youth which makes the man content to throw one section of his life after another behind him, not in search of a final restingplace, but because moral progress is the highest end he can discern. The choice is substantially that of Lessing; only Lessing's resignation to the infinite duration of the pursuit of infinite and absolute truth was natural and spontaneous, and left his life as full as ever of objects and interests. But if the progress is the end, and the only object of art and philosophy is to enable the student to interpolate as many stages as possible between his natural self and an indifferent goal, then material events are only important in so far as they further or retard this endeavour, and historical accuracy of narration becomes a secondary matter. But the internal and external lives of individuals do not run in parallel lines, nor advance at an equal pace; and the attempt to make their crises synchronize only distorts the real succession of events and opinions. The immortality of Lotte and Frederika is perfectly legitimate, and consoles us for the easy passage from Werther to the Wahlverwandschaften, and thence to The new and peculiar feature of these such Confessions as Alfred de Musset's. sentimental pseudo-autobiographies is that But the ready abuse of which this sentithe supposed author not merely despairs of mental style admits makes it doubtful whefinding consolation himself, but denies àther any loss results from its necessarily priori the possibility of its being found by fragmentary character. any one. He has no conviction, no ambition, and no desire but that for personal

In the parallel variety of analytic autobiography, Goethe does not, like Byron or