Autobiographical Sketches | Page 6

more determinate adjudication on their claims as works of
art. At present, I feel authorized to make haughtier pretensions in right
of their conception than I shall venture to do, under the peril of being
supposed to characterize their execution. Two remarks only I shall
address to the equity of my reader. First, I desire to remind him of the
perilous difficulty besieging all attempts to clothe in words the
visionary scenes derived from the world of dreams, where a single false
note, a single word in a wrong key, ruins the whole music; and,
secondly, I desire him to consider the utter sterility of universal
literature in this one department of impassioned prose; which certainly
argues some singular difficulty suggesting a singular duty of
indulgence in criticizing any attempt that even imperfectly succeeds.
The sole Confessions, belonging to past times, that have at all
succeeded in engaging the attention of men, are those of St. Augustine
and of Rousseau. The very idea of breathing a record of human passion,
not into the ear of the random crowd, but of the saintly confessional,
argues an impassioned theme. Impassioned, therefore, should be the
tenor of the composition. Now, in St. Augustine's Confessions is found
one most impassioned passage, viz., the lamentation for the death of his
youthful friend in the fourth book; one, and no more. Further there is
nothing. In Rousseau there is not even so much. In the whole work
there is nothing grandly affecting but the character and the inexplicable
misery of the writer.
Meantime, by what accident, so foreign to my nature, do I find myself
laying foundations towards a higher valuation of my own workmanship?
O reader, I have been talking idly. I care not for any valuation that

depends upon comparison with others. Place me where you will on the
scale of comparison: only suffer me, though standing lowest in your
catalogue, to rejoice in the recollection of letters expressing the most
fervid interest in particular passages or scenes of the Confessions, and,
by rebound from them, an interest in their author: suffer me also to
anticipate that, on the publication of some parts yet in arrear of the
Suspiria, you yourself may possibly write a letter to me, protesting that
your disapprobation is just where it was, but nevertheless that you are
disposed to shake hands with me--by way of proof that you like me
better than I deserve.
FOOTNOTES
[1] "Next to the bible in currency."--That is, next in the fifteenth
century to the Bible of the nineteenth century. The diffusion of the "De
Imitatione Christi" over Christendom (the idea of Christendom, it must
be remembered, not then including any part of America) anticipated, in
1453, the diffusion of the Bible in 1853. But why? Through what
causes? Elsewhere I have attempted to show that this enormous (and
seemingly incredible) popularity of the "De Imitatione Christi" is
virtually to be interpreted as a vicarious popularity of the Bible. At that
time the Bible itself was a fountain of inspired truth every where sealed
up; but a whisper ran through the western nations of Europe that the
work of Thomas à Kempis contained some slender rivulets of truth
silently stealing away into light from that interdicted fountain. This
belief (so at least I read the case) led to the prodigious multiplication of
the book, of which not merely the reimpressions, but the separate
translations, are past all counting; though bibliographers have
undertaken to count them. The book came forward as an answer to the
sighing of Christian Europe for light from heaven. I speak of Thomas à
Kempis as the author; but his claim was disputed. Gerson was adopted
by France as the author; and other local saints by other nations.
[2] At the same time it must not be denied, that, if you lose by a journal
in the way here described, you also gain by it. The journal gives you
the benefit of its own separate audience, that might else never have
heard your name. On the other hand, in such a case, the journal secures
to you the special enmity of its own peculiar antagonists. These papers,
for instance, of mine, not being political, were read possibly in a
friendly temper by the regular supporters of the journal that published

them. But some of my own political friends regarded me with
displeasure for connecting myself at all with a reforming journal. And
far more, who would have been liberal enough to disregard that
objection, naturally lost sight of me when under occultation to them in
a journal which they never saw.
[3] The crime of Josephus in relation to Christianity is the same, in fact,
as that of Lauder in respect to Milton. It was easy enough to detect
plagiarisms in the "Paradise