Philip Gilbert Hamerton | Page 4

When the materials are not supplied in

abundance, a writer will eke them out with conjectural expressions
which he only intends as an amplification, yet which may contain
germs of error to be in their turn amplified by some other writer, and
made more extensively erroneous.
It has frequently been said that an autobiography must of necessity be
an untrue representation of its subject, as no man can judge himself
correctly. If it is intended to imply that somebody else, having a much
slighter acquaintance with the man whose life is to be narrated, would
produce a more truthful book, one may be permitted to doubt the
validity of the inference. Thousands of facts are known to a man
himself with reference to his career, and a multitude of determinant
motives, which are not known even to his most intimate friends, still
less to the stranger who so often undertakes the biography. The reader
of an autobiography has this additional advantage, that the writer must
be unconsciously revealing himself all along, merely by his way of
telling things.
With regard to the great question of frankness and reserve, I hold that
the reader has a fair claim to hear the truth, as a biography is not
avowedly a romance, but at the same time that it is right to maintain a
certain reserve. My rule shall be to say nothing that can hurt the living,
and the memory of the dead shall be dealt with as tenderly as may be
compatible with a truthful account of the influences that have impelled
me in one direction or another.
I have all the more kindly feelings towards the dead, that when these
pages appear I shall be one of themselves, and therefore unable to
defend my own memory as they are unable to defend theirs.
The notion of being a dead man is not entirely displeasing to me. If the
dead are defenceless, they have this compensating advantage, that
nobody can inflict upon them any sensible injury; and in beginning a
book which is not to see the light until I am lying comfortably in my
grave, with six feet of earth above me to deaden the noises of the upper
world, I feel quite a new kind of security, and write with a more
complete freedom from anxiety about the quality of the work than has
been usual at the beginning of other manuscripts.

Nevertheless, the clear and steady contemplation of death (I have been
looking the grim king in the face for the last hour) may produce a
paralyzing effect upon a man by making his life's work seem very small
to him. For, whatever we believe about a future state, it is evident that
the catastrophe of death must throw each of us instantaneously into the
past, from the point of view of the living, and they will see what we
have done in a very foreshortened aspect, so that except in a few very
rare cases it must look small to them, and ever smaller as time rolls on,
and they will probably not think much of it, or remember us long on
account of it. And in thinking of ourselves as dead we instinctively
adopt the survivor's point of view. Besides which, it is reasonable to
suppose that whatever fate may be in store for us, a greater or less
degree of posthumous reputation in two or three nations on this planet
can have little effect on our future satisfaction; for if we go to heaven,
the beatitude of the life there will be so incomparably superior to the
pleasures of earthly fame that we shall never think of such vanity again;
and if we go to the place of eternal tortures they will leave us no time to
console ourselves with pleasant memories of any kind; and if death is
simply the ending of all sensation, all thought, memory, and
consciousness, it will matter nothing to a handful of dust what estimate
of the name it once bore may happen to be current amongst the living--
"Les grands Dieux savent seuls si l'âme est immortelle, Mais le juste
travaille à leur oeuvre éternelle."

CHAPTER II.
1834.
My birthplace.--My father and mother.--Circumstances of their
marriage.--Their short married life.--Birth of their child.--Death of my
mother.--Her character and habits.--My father as a widower.--Dulness
of his life.--Its degradation.
I was born at Laneside near Shaw, which is now a manufacturing town
of some importance about two miles from Oldham in Lancashire, and

about four miles from Rochdale in the same county.
Laneside is a small estate with some houses and a little cotton-mill
upon it, which belonged to my maternal grandfather. The house is of
stone, with a roof of stone slate such as is usual in those parts, and it
faces