From the “London Magazine” for September 1821.
I here present you, courteous reader, with the record of a remarkable period inmy life: according to my application of it, I trust that it will prove notmerely an interesting record, but in a considerable degree useful andinstructive. In that hope it is that I have drawn it up; and thatmust be my apology for breaking through that delicate and honourable reservewhich, for the most part, restrains us from the public exposure of our ownerrors and infirmities. Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelingsthan the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers orscars, and tearing away that “decent drapery” which time or indulgence to humanfrailty may have drawn over them; accordingly, the greater part of ourconfessions (that is, spontaneous and extra-judicial confessions) proceed fromdemireps, adventurers, or swindlers: and for any such acts of gratuitousself-humiliation from those who can be supposed in sympathy with the decent andself-respecting part of society, we must look to French literature, or to thatpart of the German which is tainted with the spurious and defective sensibilityof the French. All this I feel so forcibly, and so nervously am I alive toreproach of this tendency, that I have for many months hesitated about thepropriety of allowing this or any part of my narrative to come before thepublic eye until after my death (when, for many reasons, the whole will bepublished); and it is not without an anxious review of the reasons for andagainst this step that I have at last concluded on taking it.
Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they courtprivacy and solitude: and even in their choice of a grave will sometimessequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as ifdeclining to claim fellowship with the great family of man, and wishing (in theaffecting language of Mr. Wordsworth)
“—Humbly to express
A penitential loneliness.”
It is well, upon the whole, and for the interest of us all, that it should beso: nor would I willingly in my own person manifest a disregard of suchsalutary feelings, nor in act or word do anything to weaken them; but, on theone hand, as my self-accusation does not amount to a confession of guilt, so,on the other, it is possible that, if it did, the benefit resulting toothers from the record of an experience purchased at so heavy a price mightcompensate, by a vast overbalance, for any violence done to the feelings I havenoticed, and justify a breach of the general rule. Infirmity and misery do notof necessity imply guilt. They approach or recede from shades of that darkalliance, in proportion to the probable motives and prospects of the offender,and the palliations, known or secret, of the offence; in proportion as thetemptations to it were potent from the first, and the resistance to it, in actor in effort, was earnest to the last. For my own part, without breach of truthor modesty, I may affirm that my life has been, on the whole, the life of aphilosopher: from my birth I was made an intellectual creature, andintellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, evenfrom my schoolboy days. If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I ambound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess not yetrecorded {1} of anyother man, it is no less true that I have struggled against this fascinatingenthralment with a religious zeal, and have