These
pages reproduce me very imperfectly, and there are many things in me of
which I find no trace in them. I suppose it is because, in the first
place, sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy; and in the next,
because I depend so much upon surrounding circumstances. When there is
no call upon me, and nothing to put me to the test, I fall back into
melancholy; and so the practical man, the cheerful man, the literary
man, does not appear in these pages. The portrait is lacking in
proportion and breadth; it is one-sided, and wants a center; it has, as
it were, been painted from too near.
The true reason why we know ourselves so little lies in the difficulty
we find in standing at a proper distance from ourselves, in taking up
the right point of view, so that the details may help rather than hide
the general effect. We must learn to look at ourselves socially and
historically if we wish to have an exact idea of our relative worth, and
to look at our life as a whole, or at least as one complete period of
life, if we wish to know what we are and what we are not. The ant which
crawls to and fro over a face, the fly perched upon the forehead of a
maiden, touch them indeed, but do not see them, for they never embrace
the whole at a glance.
Is it wonderful that misunderstandings should play so great a part in
the world, when one sees how difficult it is to produce a faithful
portrait of a person whom one has been studying for more than twenty
years? Still, the effort has not been altogether lost; its reward has
been the sharpening of one's perceptions of the outer world.
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