thinking is only resorted to when the need for thought compels the living organism to think. At a later stage this is not strictly accurate; the brain has manifestly increased its range and its activity, and men or let us say some few men-take pleasure in thinking, without being driven to it by external circumstance. External environment in the shape of prey, and internal stimulus in the shape of hunger, compel the hippopotamus to hunt, and to think within the limits necessary to successful hunting. External environment in the shape of the Greek city-state obviously influenced the form of Plato's Republic, but certainly it did not compel him to write it, or every fellow-citizen would also have produced a similar political treatise; the internal influence was the power of active thought, in which Plato happened to excel his contemporaries. The difference between the hippopotamus and Plato therefore lies in the range and power of active thought.

It may be suggested that the development of Will and consciousness from the possession of power should have produced a larger range of thought earlier in the scale of life, and that our illustrative hippopotamus should have conceived, not indeed an ideal republic to charm and perhaps delude every generation of his successors, but at least a practical hippopotamopolis. But to argue thus is to forget that the power of active thought is still rare and limited even in the case of man, and it ignores the external influence of circumstance on life.

The enlarged mental range even of the successful and active seeker after power was continually limited by the operation of habit and its outcome, instinct, which inhibits the Will in various directions by the compelling force of ancestral authority, tribal custom, and contemporary environment. And since habit and instinct operate on acts that are frequently repeated, it is plain that the Will is inhibited in matters of considerable importance to the organism. But habit is no more than the general tendency of all matter, and of mental not less than physical matter, towards inertia and unconsciousness; and instinct, which is stereotyped and hereditary habit, is therefore the retort of material circumstance upon the conscious mental will.

Every living thing inherits the fruits of the victories or defeats of its ancestors in the long struggle of life with circum

stance, and receives the advantages or pays the cost of those victories or defeats in the potentialities or limitations which the struggle has left the organism. Whether we influence or are influenced by circumstance, each successive act stamps its mark upon the character of the individual and its offspring, and every day is a day of judgment, silent, irrevocable, and to that extent conclusive. That which is done it appears that God Himself cannot undo; and it is perhaps to this, rather than to the absence of desire, that the great French writer should have ascribed the awful melancholy which he attributed to omnipotence.

But material circumstance, in the guise of habit, again failed to conquer life and the Will to Live completely; for while it stabilised much nascent mentality as instinct, part at least remained free and developed into intelligence. Instinct is the passive daughter of circumstance by habit, while intelligence is the active son of life. Somewhere in the debatable territory occupied by these rival manifestations of consciousness will be found the original seat of the third and final phase which the Will has assumed in its endless conflict with circumstance—the intelligent Will or Purpose.

If these deductions be correct, the Will in Nature is not altogether the Will of metaphysics. The Will in our analysis is both bound and free-free within certain limits and bound, or rather impotent, beyond that variable frontier. It derives directly from life, but it has been forced by circumstance, the steadfast enemy and apparently the eternal partner of life, into many strange byways. Of these, propagation, sexual or asexual, is one; environment alternately provoking revolt or compelling submission is a second; and the development of intelligent purpose, still rare and occasional, but perhaps increasing, is a third.

A. WYATT TILBY.

SOME FEMININE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

1. The Life of Liza Lehmann. By HERSELF. Fisher Unwin. 1919. 2. The Worlds and I. By Ella WheelER WILCOX. Gay & Hancock. 1919.

3. Impressions that Remained. By ETHEL SMYTH. Longmans, Green. 1919.

HE number of women who have written autobiographies is of extremely small, but considering the proportion of male to female writers, the number of men who have done so is not much larger. The incautious on reading these words may leap up with a host of instances, but they must be requested to pass them through a very close sieve which will reject all the journals, sketches, and autobiographical reminiscences, all jottings about contemporary personages, and all those records of mere events which are shown as happening to a body that we have not seen, and touching a personality into which we are not allowed to penetrate. Sir David Hunter Blair, for instance, recently published a book of conversational reminiscences covering with some minuteness the experiences of a long and active life, but since he omitted the vital experiences, this book is no more autobiography than a list of the kings of England is history. Equally the diaries of Augustus Hare and Crabb Robinson are not autobiographies, for their chief interest, to the writer as well as to the reader, is their recollection of other individuals who passed before the observant gaze of the diarist.

The true autobiography has one interest only, that of the author's personality as it appeared to himself; that is the matter of his work which will succeed or fail, according as he is or is not capable of dealing with it as an artist. The rarity of good autobiographies is easily accounted for by the extraordinary difficulty of grasping and using this content. Painters often paint their own portraits, though not all with the success that Rembrandt and Sir William Orpen have attained. Nevertheless, any painter, compared with an autobiographer, has an easy task. That all important accessory, the looking-glass, is given to him

from without; he has but to put it in front of him and look into it to see his features very much as they appear to the world at large. He can observe them, if he care to do so, set in contemplation, distorted by emotion, or serene in contentment. The autobiographer has to make his own looking-glass, and this feat of mental construction is beyond the reach of all but the specially gifted. Possession of the highest intellectual gifts does not guarantee the possession of this one; while there are men of ordinary abilities, like William Hickey, who develop if without any effort.

It is a peculiar faculty, this power to see oneself standing out as the central figure of a world humming with notable events and crowded with greater and more conspicuous personalities; it is the power of selection and concentration that lies in every artist applied within instead of without. But this special faculty of vision is not all; a special use has to be made of it. It may be reserved by its possessor for a secret mental exercise, it may inspire poetry, it may furnish the material for imaginative fiction, or lastly it may project a self-image so conspicuous and so compelling as to prompt the great act of faithful reconstruction which is an autobiography in its only proper sense, the story of a personality. Autobiography is only fiction, but a fiction in which the triumph of the imagination in recreating the unity of personality is so illuminative that, in the matter of external events and their sequence, or even of the sequence of mental states, realism can be pushed to its utmost limit, which is the exact reproduction of circumstances, with as much accuracy as memory, assisted by written record, can achieve.

Autobiography is a work of art; it is a novel, a poem, a drama. Any experience would furnish the matter, but the power to objectify and reproduce it is so rare. Works of art in which external events can be arbitrarily selected by the imagination may be more orderly, their modelling cleaner, their process to the climaxes surer, their catastrophes more overwhelming, but, whereas these are only endowed with likelihood, the tremendous force of actuality breathes through an autobiography with a more than compensating effect. The effect of truth, so far as it is humanly possible, upon consciousness is extraordinarily powerful; it may be judged in the careful discrimination which children make between what is told to

them as true and what is 'make-believe,' and by the enormously increased coefficient of emotion on our part which attends some narrative of joy or sorrow when we know that living beings, not airy creations of the brain, were the actors in it.

With this emotional thrust of truth behind it autobiography can cover its oddities of construction and any defiance of dramatic traditions which may be forced upon it by circumstances. But it can only gain the full effect from its advantages if the artistic imagination, used autobiographically, has successfully exercised itself in attaining the essential unity. Diaries and journals fall short of the full effect for this very reason; they are mosaics, not particularly well fitted together, little fragments of personality chipped off from day to day, observed now in one medium now in another, confused with other events and other personalities, the parts wanting relief, and the whole falling short of unity. The autobiographer worthy of the name takes his stand firmly at a definite time and in a definite place; there, planting his easel, he proceeds to summon up his own image as a central and all-absorbing reality, one amid all its dramatic changes and chances. It is the intensity of the absorption that produces the reflection in which a strange but fascinating Doppelgänger is thrown up against the arras of the years, fearful, wonderful, almost unbelievable. And the act of literary recreation is nearly an agony, so intense is the anxiety of the artist to reveal his own vision to others.

This anxiety of the artist, even though it seem to the author moral and not æsthetic, is inseparable from a great autobiographical creation. It sounds like a canto fermo all through what is perhaps the greatest autobiography ever written, Rousseau's 'Confessions.' It appeared to Rousseau of overwhelming importance that he should counteract the calumnies of his enemies by stripping his soul naked to show that, with all its blemishes, it was at least as good as that of any other man ; and though, even in this ecstasy of truth-telling, he did not tell the truth, he produced a self-portrait of such amazing quality that this very creation modified the truth for ever afterwards. If the highest standard is the best standard, then the test of approximation to the qualities of Rousseau's 'Confessions' is an excellent one to apply to an autobiography.

Fanny Burney wrote an entertaining journal; the Comtesse

VOL. 231. NO. 472.

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