AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 48, 26 February 1927, Page 20

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

FAB TOO MANY OF THEM.

During the last twenty years or so autobiography has become the rankest weed in the circulating library (writes Arthur Waugh in the "Daily Telegraph"). Obese and slovenly'volumes, mostly the work of empty brains,have trailed their train of anecdotes down the news columns of the Press. Everyone who has ever met "anyone" recounts with solemnity bow the great man remarked,'"Would you kindly get out of my way?'' and dubs the anecdote a reminiscence. Who enjoys all this vain gossip it is difficult to conceive, but at any rate it has no sort of literary justification, and not even a bowing acquaintance with the art of autobiography. ■ For the critic who said that every man has a book in his brain if he would only sit down, look into his heart, and write, was not referring to a record to stray encounters with people of title jn the vestibule of a musichall. The only significant and valuable tiling about a man is what he is; and the only important incidents or imprcs sions of his life arc those that moulded his character and shaped his personality, Mr. John Mascfield has put the essence of the matter into ii. phrase when hv; speaks of "those moments of the soul in years of earth," the days of glow and gloom, which by some natural magic fix themselves in-the memory and continually recur as guides and illustrations on our way. A scent, a picture, a tune, a flash of light in darkness, the shape of a tree, the tone of a voice— theso aro tho messagos of Nature to the awakening'soul. They begin with tho first impressions of childhood, and they never cease adding'to .their number so long as the brain is capable of receptivity. Those influences, recurring and interweaving, come in time to constitute tho personality in which they are gathered together; and thus a panorama, or "fantasia," of their forms may bo reckoned tlio most intimate autobiography to which any individual [ is susceptible."