The Story of My Life | Page 2

Before the end of the year was reached Mr. Letts would have been
ashamed to own his diary. It had become a bursting, groaning dust-bin
of information, for the most part useless. The biggest elastic band made
could hardly encircle its bulk, swelled by photographs, letters,
telegrams, dried flowers--the whole making up a confusion in which
every one but the owner would seek in vain to find some sense or
meaning.
About six years ago I moved into a smaller house in London, and I
burnt a great many of my earlier diaries as unmovable rubbish. The few
passages which I shall quote in this book from those which escaped
destruction will prove that my bonfire meant no great loss!
Still, when it was suggested to me in the year of my stage jubilee that I
ought to write down my recollections, I longed for those diaries! I
longed for anything which would remind me of the past and make it
live again for me. I was frightened. Something would be expected of
me, since I could not deny that I had had an eventful life packed full of
incident, and that by the road I had met many distinguished and
interesting men and women. I could not deny that I had been fifty years
on the stage, and that this meant enough material for fifty books, if only
the details of every year could be faithfully told. But it is not given to
all of us to see our lives in relief as we look back. Most of us, I think,
see them in perspective, of which our birth is the vanishing point.
Seeing, too, is only half the battle. How few people can describe what

they see!
While I was thinking in this obstructive fashion and wishing that I
could write about my childhood like Tolstoi, about my girlhood like
Marie Bashkirtseff, and about the rest of my days and my work like
many other artists of the pen, who merely, by putting black upon white,
have had the power to bring before their readers not merely themselves
"as they lived," but the most homely and intimate details of their lives,
the friend who had first impressed on me that I ought not to leave my
story untold any longer, said that the beginning was easy enough:
"What is the first thing you remember? Write that down as a start."
But for my friend's practical suggestion it is doubtful if I should ever
have written a line! He relieved my anxiety about my powers of
compiling a stupendous autobiography, and made me forget that
writing was a new art, to me, and that I was rather old to try my hand at
a new art. My memory suddenly began to seem not so bad after all. For
weeks I had hesitated between Othello's "Nothing extenuate, nor write
down aught in malice," and Pilate's "What is truth?" as my guide and
my apology. Now I saw that both were too big for my modest endeavor.
I was not leaving a human document for the benefit of future
psychologists and historians, but telling as much of my story as I could
remember to the good, living public which has been considerate and
faithful to me for so many years.
How often it has made allowances for me when I was nervous on first
nights! With what patience it has waited long and uncomfortable hours
to see me! Surely its charity would quickly cover my literary sins.
I gave up the search for a motto which should express my wish to tell
the truth so far as I know it, to describe things as I see them, to be
faithful according to my light, not dreading the abuse of those who
might see in my light nothing but darkness.
I shut up "Othello" and did not try to verify the remark of "jesting"
Pilate. The only instruction that I gave myself was to "begin at the
beginning."

E.T.

THE STORY OF MY LIFE

I
A CHILD OF THE STAGE
1848-1856
This is the first thing I remember.
In the corner of a lean-to whitewashed attic stood a fine, plain, solid
oak bureau. By climbing up on to this bureau I could see from the
window the glories of the sunset. My attic was on a hill in a large and
busy town, and the smoke of a thousand chimneys hung like a gray veil
between me and the fires in the sky. When the sun had set, and the
scarlet and gold, violet and primrose, and all those magic colors that
have no names, had faded into the dark, there were other fires for me to
see. The flaming forges came out, and terrified while they fascinated
my childish imagination.
What