Philosophy and Autobiography Reflections On Truth Self Knowledge and Knowledge of Others Christopher Hamilton All Chapter

Philosophy and Autobiography:
Reflections on Truth, Self-Knowledge

and Knowledge of Others Christopher
Hamilton
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Philosophy and
Autobiography

and Knowledge of Others
Christopher Hamilton
Philosophy and Autobiography
Philosophy and
Autobiography
and Knowledge of Others
Department of Theology and Religious Studies
King’s College London
London, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-70656-2 ISBN 978-3-030-70657-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70657-9
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v
For Nelly
Je ne parle pour personne: j’ai trop à faire pour trouver mon propre langage.
Je ne guide personne: je ne sais pas, ou je sais mal, où je vais.
—Albert Camus
Acknowledgements
I am extremely grateful to Brendan George and Rebecca Hinsley at

Palgrave Macmillan for their enthusiasm for this project, their help and
support whilst I was working on it, and their patience in giving me the
time to bring it to fruition.
I have benefited enormously from conversations on the topics of which
this book treats with a number of friends, to all of whom I am deeply
grateful: Christopher Cowley, Sebastian Gardner, David Leech, Michael
Newton and Patrick Verge.
I am grateful to my university, King’s College London, for giving me
time free from teaching and administrative duties to complete this work.
My greatest debt is indicated in the dedication to this book.
I am grateful to the original publishers for permission to reprint mate-
rial from three of my previous publications:
‘“No one is the author of his life”: Philosophy, Biography and
Autobiography’ in The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature,
edited by Michael Mack and Barry Stocker, 123–142. London: Palgrave
Macmillan
vii
viii Acknowledgements
‘Walter Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um 1900: Longing, Enchantment

and the Material Subject’ in Life Writing, vol. 15, no. 3, 2018, 369–383
© Taylor and Francis
‘“An immense expenditure of energy come to nothing”: Philosophy,
Literature and Death in Peter Weiss’ Abschied von den Eltern’ in Routledge
Companion to Death and Literature, edited by Neil Murphy, Daniel
Jernigan, Michelle Wang, 333–341. London: Routledge 2019
Contents
Opening: The voice off in Philosophy 1

Bibliography 6

Introduction: Who Is Speaking and to Whom? 9
Bibliography 37

‘The god of the city’: Walter Benjamin, Enchantment and the
Material Subject 39
Bibliography 58
immense expenditure of energy come to nothing’:

‘An
Philosophy, Literature and Death in Peter Weiss’ Abschied von
den Eltern 61
Bibliography 74

‘Someone is missing’: Jean-Paul Sartre, comédie and the
Longing for Necessity 75
Bibliography 93
ix
x Contents

‘How terrible is the deterioration in myself!’: Childhood,
Middle Age and the Redemption of a Humanist in George
Orwell’s ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ 95
Bibliography 116

‘Little soft oases’: Edmund Gosse, the Hard-Driven Soul and
Inconsolability117
Bibliography 137

‘This book should be heavy with things and flesh’: The
Body, Sensation and Love of the World in Camus’ Le Premier
homme139
Bibliography 162

Closing (Beginning with an Abandoned Opening)163
Bibliography 180
Bibliography183
Index191
Opening: The voice off in Philosophy
A philosophical text is in many ways a gesture of control: the philoso-

pher seeks to get as clear as possible on the topic of which he treats; to
order and organise the material; to leave aside irrelevancies; to delineate
and delimit, sometimes to define; to head off misunderstandings and
confusions; to spell it all out and make the connections between the vari-
ous considerations offered compelling in rational terms (and not, say, in
associative or imaginative terms); and so on. That, at any rate, is cer-
tainly an ideal of philosophical reflection harboured by many philoso-
phers. It is so not least because it is supposed that this is what is needed
for reflection to arrive at the truth, for it aims to leave behind the vicis-
situdes of an individual life, the peculiarities of an individual way of
experiencing the world, of the way it shunts and cajoles and jostles an
individual, which will always be different from one person to the next.
Of course, no text in philosophy achieves that ideal, and, although this
is certainly a source of frustration to many philosophers, it is, in reality,
a blessing, since otherwise it would spell the end of discussion, which is
without doubt one of the things that makes philosophy worth pursuing
at all. This gives rise to a strange situation in which philosophers seek to
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C. Hamilton, Philosophy and Autobiography,
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2 C. Hamilton
bring conversation to an end by providing the kind of reasoned argu-

ment, controlled and controlling, that issues in truth, an argument that,
once over, has served its purpose and, on that issue, leaves nothing more
to say (truth is something that one then contemplates)—and yet cannot
but celebrate their failure to provide such, since it is the failure to arrive
at truth in that sense that means that the debate continues. Hence phi-
losophy’s neuroticism, its obsessive need to assure itself of its control and
power, fed by the guilty recognition—its guilty conscience—that that
need of control and power depends on its repudiating something with-
out which it would yet die.
We can put this in terms of the question of voice. One voice of phi-
losophy—the voice of control and order—is centre stage. This is the voice
to which we are supposed to listen when hearing the philosopher speak
or when reading his or her text. Yet the other voice is there, the voice that
wants the conversation to go on, the voice that pursues the discussion for
its own sake, wants it to continue and does not want to bring anything to
an end, but, rather, to acknowledge life in as much of its fullness as pos-
sible. It is there because it is the voice, after all, that keeps the philosopher
at his or her task of seeking for order: it is the voice of life in all its sham-
bolic confusion that brings the philosopher to his work in the first place,
the unbearable chaos into which he wishes to bring philosophical order.
This other voice might be sceptical or ironic or mocking; might be like a
wise fool or a clown; might be playful or mischievous; might be indiffer-
ent to the way of thinking that characterises the voice centre stage; might
be hostile or in despair; will almost certainly be fearful; and so on. It will,
in one way or another, be the voice of an individual for it will be the voice
that registers a particular person’s sense of life as relentlessly confusing;
the voice of confused life, shared by all, speaking in this way in this indi-
vidual, life’s confusion inflected in this way because filtered through
this person.
I find it helpful to say that this voice off is an autobiographical voice—
where, of course, any given autobiographical voice will itself differ from
other such voices and express, or contain, its own style, its own tone, and
so on. The autobiographical voice will always function as a voice that
bears witness and thus invites us to pay attention to an individual in all
his or her peculiarity. For this reason, the autobiographical voice will
always be part of philosophy’s guilty conscience because it will always
direct us, in varying degrees, and in varying ways, away from the voice
that wishes to overcome the peculiarity of the individual: the autobio-
graphical voice welcomes the thickness of the self—what Gerard Manley
Hopkins calls ‘the throng and stack of being, so rich, so distinctive, so
important…that taste of I and me above and in all things, which is more
distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell
of walnut leaf or camphor’ (Hopkins 1967 [1880], 145)1—by way of
disorganisation, irrelevancies, peculiar associative leaps of thought, feel-
ing and sensibility, and so on.
So this raises for me the issue of what we are to make of philosophy’s
relations to autobiography. It would be possible, of course, to try and
trace, in certain philosophical texts, where we can see the voice off mak-
ing its claim. Central here would be attention to the various forms of fear
that the text expresses: the gesture of control that characterises a philo-
sophical text work in the service of keeping at bay something that the
philosopher fears, some kind of disorder, something disruptive. There
may be one overriding fear, or a fear operative over a large section of a
text—lack of emotional control is very common here; or there may be
some other fear in place over some specific part of the text, as, for exam-
ple, one can detect fear in the form of a feeling of disgust in Kant’s discus-
sions of sexual desire (‘Sexual love makes of the loved person an object of
appetite: as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside
as one casts aside a lemon which has been sucked dry’ [Kant 1997, 163]).
Fear of morally reprehensible behaviour is extremely common, which is
why so many texts in moral philosophy operate as fantasies of control
over those who are wicked, for example, in the claims that only if you are
morally good can you be truly happy, or that if you are thinking straight
(rationally) you will be morally good. Again, much of the discussion in
the so-called ‘problem of evil’ is actuated by the fear that someone might
look aghast at the world and not be able to bear what he sees: the argu-
ment seeks to placate the worried, which includes the philosopher who
offers the argument himself.
4 C. Hamilton
Of course, fear might well be only one of the inflections of the voice
off. Where in the philosophical text do we discern a joke suppressed or
indulged, a comic turning avoided, a strange and highly individual
association of ideas passed over or skirted round? Where do we sense
the philosopher taking him- or herself too seriously? Where do we dis-
cern exhaustion or frustration or the sigh of relief? Where do we come
across a refusal to engage or exasperation or stubbornness? Where is
there recourse to imagery or allusion or association, or to striking turns
of phrase or the sinuosity of language? Where do we find priggishness
or a childish attitude or pomposity? It would be naïve to suppose that
these kinds of things are not there in even the most rigorously ordered
philosophical text, for they are signs of the necessarily imperfect con-
trol and grasp that the philosopher has over the argument he or she is
developing.
The movement of thought here is, I take it, essentially Nietzschean.
Nietzsche’s strategy is not to ask: is this claim true?, but rather: why
would someone want to make this claim? Most philosophers regard
such a move as intellectually bankrupt, supposing that the form of
argumentation is ad hominem and for this reason unacceptable, but the
truth is that—as has been nicely argued by Robert Solomon (Solomon
2004, Chap. 1)—we need to acknowledge, first, that we use ad homi-
nem arguments a great deal in ordinary life and, second, that some ad
hominem arguments are bad and some are good. Like all arguments,
they have to be wielded carefully, sensitively, and, when they are, they
can be highly effective.
Of course, things here are complicated. If I know you well, I might
well be able to dismiss your claims in some context as merely the product
of the envy or naïveté that is typical of you. (‘You only think that because
you’re envious.’) But—to take the example of Kant—I might know next
to nothing about his life and, in that sense, it is perfectly possible that his
strictures against sex express, not so much what he thinks, as what he
wanted to think. Perhaps he was someone with a very powerful sexual
drive or peculiarly inventive sexual imagination, but he would have liked,
for whatever reason, to rid himself of such, and, in this sense, his hostility
to sex is less a matter of what he thinks than of what he would like to
think: he was trying in his philosophical hostility to sex to rid himself of
his powerful desires. Perhaps the one thing that tormented Kant in the
middle of the night was his lust; and perhaps that was absolutely the one
thing that so shamed him that he would never admit it to anyone else,
perhaps even fully to himself. But none of this means that the ad homi-
nem argument has no force. It means, rather, that we have to be careful
about moving directly from this is what the text claims to this is what the
man (or woman) believed. It might have been, rather, what he wanted to
believe, needed to believe, was trying to convince himself of, took himself
to believe when, in a certain mood, he felt suddenly free of the thing that
was burdening him, and so on. Nietzsche, indeed, who used ad hominem
arguments all the time, must himself often be read in this way.
Be that as it may, this approach—that of tracing the workings of the
voice off in philosophical texts—is not one that I seek to adopt here.
Rather, for reasons that I try to make clear in the introduction, I approach
the matter from the other side, the side of autobiography. To anticipate:
if it is true that philosophy is caught up in the toils of the autobiographi-
cal, then there is little reason to suppose that autobiography is not impli-
cated in philosophy. The very idea that autobiography is one thing and
philosophy another comes itself from philosophy’s neurotic desire to
exercise control, to order, place and clarify. Philosophy has always been
jealous of its position and has always wanted to cast other forms of think-
ing as non-philosophical, and thus often, for some philosophers, sub-
standard, however useful to philosophy they might be. But even if they
are useful in this way, it is philosophy that decides, and it resents the
claim that other kinds of reflection can be doing philosophy. This is part
of philosophy’s obsession with purity and its own autonomy (philosophy
is ‘purely conceptual’ is the way this is often put by philosophers them-
selves).2 But it is precisely this self-image of philosophy that is put into
doubt by its entanglement with autobiography and this is why I have
decided here to try to explore certain autobiographical texts with an eye
on—though not only on—what they have to say about topics of which
philosophy treats. But I shall have failed in the task I have set myself if I
manage to make clear only that autobiography has something to contrib-
ute to philosophical discussion of such matters. Rather, my aim is more
ambitious: it is to try to unseat ready categories of what counts as a philo-
sophical text and what an autobiographical text. I would like, in this way,
for this book to issue in a confusion, a productive confusion, where one
feels unsure about what philosophy is and what autobiography is. This
6 C. Hamilton
desire is, no doubt, an expression of an intellectual and emotional rest-

lessness—a restlessness of sensibility and temperament—that has always
characterised my life and continues to do so. But beyond that I hope to
keep my eye on one of the deepest impulses to philosophy in the first
place, but which it so readily betrays, namely, that of not knowing. And a
philosophy that does not know is certainly at one with the autobiogra-
phies I have chosen to explore here.
Notes
1. Cf. the sense that Joana, the protagonist of Clarice Lispector’s novel Near
to the Wild Heart, has of herself: ‘I feel who I am and the impression is
lodged in the highest part of my brain, on my lips (especially on my
tongue), on the surface of my arms and also running through me, deep
inside my body, but where, exactly where, I can’t say. The taste is grey,
slightly reddish, a bit bluish in the old parts, and it moves like gelatin,
sluggishly. Sometimes it becomes sharp and wounds me, colliding with
me’ (Lispector 2014 [1943], 12).
2. Cf. here what Stephen Gaukroger writes about the prevailing self-image of
philosophy (Gaukroger 2020, 7): ‘[T]he prevailing assumption among
philosophers [is]…that there are no intrinsic weaknesses in thinking phil-
osophically, that any weaknesses can only be weaknesses of particular
philosophical viewpoints or theories, and as such can be resolved within
philosophy, by moving to a different philosophical viewpoint or theory.
On such a view, philosophy has no ‘outside’, as it were: it is the most
abstract discipline possible, something under which any form of reflection
can be subsumed. It is effectively the canonical form of reflection on
the world.’
Bibliography
Gaukroger, S. 2020 The Failures of Philosophy: a Historical Essay. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Hopkins, G.M. 1967 [1880] Poems and Prose. W.H. Gardner (ed).
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lispector, C. 2014 [1943] Near to the Wild Heart. Translated by Alison Entrekin.
Edited and provided with an introduction by Benjamin Moser.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Kant, I. 1997 Lectures on Ethics. Edited by Peter Heath and Jerome Schneewind,
translated by P. Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [The original
lecture notes are from the 1760s to 1794.]
Solomon, R. 2004 Living With Nietzsche: What the Great ‘Immoralist’ Has to
Teach Us. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Introduction: Who Is Speaking
and to Whom?
In his A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises, Stanley Cavell

(Cavell 1994, vii) says he starts with guiding intuition ‘that there is an
internal connection between philosophy and autobiography, that each is
a dimension of the other’. Many philosophers would disagree with this.
But much more significant is the fact that there are plenty of philoso-
phers whose credentials as such are unimpeachable but who would, not
so much disagree with this claim, as express bafflement that someone
could say what Cavell says—that is, someone who cannot simply be dis-
counted as having failed to understand what philosophy is by virtue of
incompetence, failure to have been educated in, into, the discipline, or
the like, but who, on the contrary, is a philosopher of outstanding talent,
imagination and sensitivity. Cavell can no more be discounted as a phi-
losopher than can those who would express bafflement at what he says.
But such baffled philosophers would, perhaps, take it as so obvious or
clear that philosophy has nothing to do with autobiography that they
would, so to speak, not know where to begin in trying to deal with the
thought. It would present itself to them as aberrant and hence, perhaps,
as simply frustrating or irritating, akin to the kind of mistake beginning
students make when they first encounter philosophy at university.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 9

C. Hamilton, Philosophy and Autobiography,
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10 C. Hamilton
It would, in any case, I suppose, be a temptation to think that we are

faced in such an issue with the task of trying to show that Cavell is right
or, alternatively, that those who are baffled by him are right, the implica-
tion of the latter then being that Cavell is mistaken and that autobiogra-
phy has nothing (much; of interest; of anything that goes deep; of
anything unsettling) to do with philosophy. That is, one could try to
show that the discussions of philosophers have nothing to do with any-
thing autobiographical and then, once that point had been secured, get
on with philosophy proper, as if the real philosophy began after the irrel-
evance of autobiography to it had been secured. But that would be to
miss Cavell’s point since part of what he wants us to think about is where
to start philosophy, is what counts as being internal to it or not. So the
proposed strategy does not so much promise to show that Cavell might
be mistaken as refuse to engage with him at all. In effect, it could secure
the point at issue only by ignoring it. For Cavell is not saying that some
(most) philosophers think that philosophy is one thing and he thinks it
is another, and that the issue is one of marshalling arguments on each side
to settle the issue. Still less is his point that one could do that and then
start doing philosophy. His point is, rather, that it is internal to philoso-
phy not to know itself, that philosophers are unclear about what it is that
they are doing and that that is not something that could, even in princi-
ple, be solved or resolved. Cavell is saying that he does not know what
philosophy is and neither does anyone else; it is internal to philosophy for
its nature be essentially contested.
So Cavell’s point is not that philosophy and autobiography are con-
nected in such and such a way or ways, as if we could get clear on the way
or ways in question. Philosophy is too unstable for it to be neatly con-
nected to autobiography in that way. And, for that matter, the latter is
also too unstable for a neat connection to philosophy. The idea that phi-
losophy and autobiography are dimensions of each other is asking us to
slow down, to pause and linger over whatever it is that we think either of
these is.
Cavell puts the issue here as matter of voice. The autobiographical
voice, one might assume, is clearly personal: when I write or speak my
autobiography, the voice is resolutely mine, however much I might con-
nect it with the voices of others, in the numerous ways I might do so.
These are my experiences (not yours) and these things happened to me

(not you). The issue here is one of authority and, one might suppose, any
authority my autobiography has comes from its being resolutely mine.
You are free to see yourself in it or not; you can walk away and not read
or listen. My autobiography has the claim on you that you let it have. But
a philosophical text aims to speak not (simply) for the philosopher who
produces it but for everyone else as well. The philosophical argument that
aims to show that God exists or that the foundation of ethics is located in
such and such a concept or that the concept of beauty is the key notion
we need in thinking about art—this argument is not intended to have
only the authority you grant it or allow it to have. It has a claim on you,
for its voice is not the voice of any one in particular: the voice that speaks
in the philosophical text is not the voice of this particular man or woman,
the philosopher, but the voice of anyone who thinks through these things.
That, at any rate, is how many philosophical texts operate. But, I think,
we all have in us a voice that seeks to be, or supposes itself to be, the voice
that speaks for all. We all of us, when we seek to convince another of the
truth of a belief we hold, aim to speak with a voice that is (that will
become) the other’s voice. One name we have for such a kind of discourse
is ‘philosophy’. That is, ‘philosophy’ is a name we have for a way of think-
ing whose expression in a voice, as a voice, is that of the voice that is
anyone’s; and we are all philosophers in that sense, there is that voice (a
voice that aspires to be such a voice) in us all. The discipline of philoso-
phy, the thing that is taught at universities, in a central version of its
incarnation, is that voice welcomed and accepted, given a home, culti-
vated and encouraged, proud of itself as being what it is. Students of
philosophy are taught to listen to that voice in themselves and to think of
it as superior to other voices they find in themselves, and such other
voices are castigated in some of the numerous ways in which a voice may
be castigated. One central voice subject to such castigation is the voice of
the individual, the voice that bears witness to, or provides testimony for,
the person who speaks, his or her individual way of confronting the world
in all its stubborn recalcitrance—in short, the autobiographical voice.
The discipline of philosophy is thus immensely seductive because it
taps into something in us all. It is not, in this sense, any kind of aberra-
tion; it is not something that is arbitrary or alien to the human condition.
12 C. Hamilton
We would not recognise ourselves without this voice, and it is certainly

the voice to which we should listen in certain disciplines—mathematics,
for example, where an individual voice is out of place, for here there is
only one correct voice: the child learning arithmetic must learn to say the
same thing as those who are authorities and the same thing as all the
other children are saying. Simone Weil expressed this by saying that, in
mathematics, the individual personality disappears: I appear in mathe-
matics only when I make a mistake; when I get it right, I do what anyone
else does who gets it right and I disappear. We could put it this way: when
I disappear, I am condemned to silence. The philosopher who wishes to
speak in a voice that is (or might be) anyone’s voice wishes to condemn
the other to silence, to leave him or her with nothing to say: the thinking
has been done, the conversation is closed. We all of us have this desire in
us; we all of us, at least at times, wish to silence the other, others, the oth-
ers. Others’ voices are for all of us, at times, and, for some, most of the
time, an unbearable din; and all of us find it extremely hard to listen: it is
one of things human beings do very badly.
Cavell’s worry about philosophy and autobiography is thus a worry
about where authority comes from in philosophy. And he says this:
Philosophers who shun the autobiographical must find another route to

philosophical authority, to, let’s say, the a priori, to speaking with necessity
and universality (logic, as Kant says, is such a route), and find another
interpretation of its arrogance (philosophy’s inherent superiority, in intel-
ligence or purity, is always a convenient such route). (Cavell 1994, 8)
Cavell is not arguing against what he calls philosophy’s arrogance, its

right to speak for the human, as he puts it, though his ironic reference to
superior intelligence and purity certainly rule these out for him as possi-
ble routes to that. What Cavell wants is to claim that the autobiographi-
cal is part of philosophy’s speaking for the human. Drawing on John
Austin and Wittgenstein, Cavell claims that they rely on the autobio-
graphical and yet they say ‘we’ in their discussions ‘of “appears,” of “in
itself,” of “knowledge,” of “promising”’ (Cavell 1994, 8). How can they
say ‘we’? ‘Their basis is autobiographical, but they evidently take what
they do and say to be representative or exemplary of the human condi-

tion as such’ (Cavell 1994, 8). And later:
The autobiographical dimension of philosophy is internal to its claim that

philosophy speaks for the human, for all; that is its necessary arrogance.
The philosophical dimension of autobiography is that the human is repre-
sentative, say, imitative, that each life is exemplary of all, a parable of each;
that is humanity’s commonness, which is internal to its endless denials of
commonness. (Cavell 1994, 10–11)
Cavell is surely right about this: I cannot be sure in advance of writing

or speaking that what I write or say will be able to speak for you. I have
to make the hazard. Helping myself to what I take to be anyone’s voice,
the voice of anyone in me, reduces the stakes of the hazard, ideally makes
it seem that the hazard is not being made at all. The fantasy here is of
power and domination and the pay-off for the individual who takes him-
self to be speaking in such a voice is strength and security, the reduction
of anxiety and fear. That is an immensely seductive vision.
But there are two things that I find unhelpful in what Cavell claims.
First: why does he suppose that philosophy is characterised by a ‘neces-
sary arrogance’? Certainly it has to speak for the human. But so do litera-
ture and film and painting and music and much else besides. Does each
of these also possess a ‘necessary arrogance’? It is hard to think so. Or, if
they do, the fact that they do—as does philosophy, on Cavell’s account—
must make us wonder what is being said. And part of the problem is that
we do not know, in advance of any hazard to this effect, what it is to speak
for the human. It is far from clear that it is correct to gloss that, as Cavell
does, by ‘for all’. ‘For all’ cannot be intended as an exceptionless generali-
sation. It is perfectly possible, after all, that someone fail, or many fail, to
recognise himself in something that one might reasonably think speaks
for the human. And the deepest reason for that is that, as Cavell well
knows, the human is not fixed, contains limitless denials of itself by
itself—what Cavell calls here ‘denials of commonness’—so that we just
cannot know that speaking for the human is speaking for all or what that
really means.
14 C. Hamilton
We could put the point by saying that it is far from clear what it means
to say that ‘each life is exemplary of all, a parable of each’. Of course, at
one level one knows what this means: I suppose that, in many of its fears,
hopes, fantasies…my life is exemplary of all lives, of each life. And I cer-
tainly think that it makes sense to speak of a kind of human fellowship as
the expression of a certain conception of value. In that conception of
value each life might then be a parable of each other life. We might find
ourselves invited into such a conception of things by philosophy or litera-
ture or poetry and so on. But you might be invited into a conception,
too, of fellowship with animals, with, say, the sheer extraordinary point-
lessness of animal life, a pointlessness that is, one might think, precisely
its point. Or I might find my life is to be a parable, or exemplary, of
animal life in its physical fragility or vulnerability. Perhaps Cavell would
not deny any of this, though he shows himself to be reluctant to accept
the invitation on the part of animal life. Seeing animal life as I have said
one might involves, of course, an invocation of the autobiographical.
But—and this is my second worry about what Cavell says, part of what I
was getting at in speaking of animal life and my seeing a fellowship with
it—the concept of the autobiographical is itself, as I remarked above, not
clear, is not fixed. I shall try to pursue this worry in the rest of what fol-
lows in this introduction, but we can start by noting that, whatever it is
that Austin and Wittgenstein mean by the autobiographical, in Cavell’s
invocation of them, this is not what the autobiographical means in many
of the forms in which we meet it, say when someone gives us an account
of his life, or part of it, showing what happened to him, what he did, and
how he sought to make sense of it all. It is not, indeed, for that matter,
what Cavell means by autobiography when he goes on, in the book of his
we are discussing, to give some fragments of his autobiography, some
moments from his life, in order to reflect on them and how they connect
with his thinking in philosophy.
I intend these comments as a form of resistance to the idea that there
is a necessary arrogance in philosophy, or, say, that this is where we should
locate any claim to authority that we might suppose philosophy to have.
‘Arrogance’ does not sound very good, though Cavell means it in the
sense of the arrogation of a voice, the claim to speak for others. Still, the
term jars with me, sits uneasily. To my ear, if philosophy wishes to claim
any authority, it might wonder if it could best do so through weakness

and vulnerability, through its not knowing, its displaying of a certain kind
of scepticism or, let us say, scepticism expressed in a certain spirit. Socrates’
claim that the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing strikes me
as being something to which philosophy needs constantly to be recalled,
a resistance to speaking for others, perhaps even, at times, a resistance to
speaking for oneself. I think of this as a recall to the human, though that
itself does not capture the point since it is also part of the human to wish
to silence other voices, as I mentioned above, in a display of knowledge,
of knowing. The desire to silence other voices, to shut out the din of oth-
ers’ voices—the temptation to think of others’ voices as a din; as they are,
sometimes, but not always—is internal to our conception of what it is to
be human, much as we might dislike it (in some moods; I do not deny
that we can relish reducing others to silence: that is part of the problem).
So far as I can see, central to philosophy’s displaying of weakness and
any authority it might claim for itself in this way, is a matter of style. It
matters what is said, of course (how could it not?). But it matters also how
one says what one says, the tone one adopts, the manner of one’s approach:
what is needed is a friendly voice, a voice that is gentle, kind. Kindness is
probably the least glamorous virtue, and I think it is badly underrated
and underexplored, but, for myself, the older I get the more I value it:
given the collective doom of death, our being marked for death, the closer
one gets to that final moment the more acutely one is likely to feel the
value of kindness, its absolute necessity in a world so baffling, so contrary
to all that we might want or hope, so unforgiving. It does not seem help-
ful to me to think of such kindness in philosophy as its arrogance, even if
the aim is a sort of authority. But is it? In one sense, it must be. After all,
a piece of philosophy claims attention, asks to be read, to be taken seri-
ously, and in that sense claims some authority. But in another sense I
would like to think that the authority philosophy claims is the authority
claimed by writing that repudiates its own authority.
I suppose I have in mind, in making these comments, a poem such as
Louise Glück’s ‘The Untrustworthy Speaker’ (Glück 2012, 216). ‘Don’t
listen to me; my heart’s been broken./I don’t see anything objectively’ the
poem begins, and so we are enticed into continuing by a voice that warns
us against doing so. In the course of the poem we meet a number of
16 C. Hamilton
profound self-doubts on the writer’s part, dependent in large part on a

strenuous attempt, but failure, to make sense of the death of her older
sister. She must confront her sister, and her sister’s death, but ‘If you want
the truth, you have to close yourself/to the older daughter, block her out’.
Her own speaking thus becomes impossible, even as she speaks. So:
‘That’s why I’m not to be trusted./Because a wound to the heart/is also a
wound to the mind.’
It is clear, as full reading of the poem makes clear, that its authority
comes largely from its intense struggle with the question of whether it has
any authority at all and, if it does, where it comes from, what it could
mean for it to have authority. The poet distrusts herself, wonders who she
is, wonders whether she is too damaged to speak, wonders also whether
being damaged in this way is a condition of speaking at all even as it dis-
ables her from doing so (if she were not damaged, what would she say?—
something, perhaps, but not this), asks us to listen and to turn away,
claims us and repudiates us, claims herself and repudiates herself. She
does not know who she is as she speaks, from what in herself she speaks,
and she does not know to whom she speaks, who could possibly be called
to listen to this voice, whether there is anyone out there who might listen,
and why he or she might do so. ‘These fragments I have shored against
my ruins’ wrote T.S. Eliot at the end of The Waste Land. The poet’s diffi-
dence is important here to the authority he has, if he has any, as is the case
with Glück. We all know that we live in the fragments—the fragments of
our life, the fragments of the lives of those we love and care for, the frag-
ments of human life that make up our history and our ever-present care-
lessness and indifference. Philosophical authority comes not, I think,
from the philosopher’s supposition that he knows and that he is going to
tell the reader or listener how things are, but rather, as Kierkegaard sug-
gested, from the mood of the subjunctive. Such philosophy, such a tone,
carries with it a reference to the philosopher as someone who offers his
thought as the best he can make of things at this moment. This is not a way
of retracting what he wishes to say or being in some sense half-hearted,
unable or unwilling to stand behind what he says, but rather of making
clear the way in which what he says is provisional, temporary, a matter of
something that will carry in itself, somewhere, his weakness, his
vulnerability, his fragility. Philosophy, from such a point of view, will be

continuous with poetry.
It has to be said that most philosophy is not written or spoken in this
way. A great deal of philosophy wishes, as I have already said, to silence
others. But it wants this, I have suggested, because the philosopher wants
to silence the voices of others in him, voices of others which are also his
voices. He wants to make bearable something that would otherwise tor-
ment or frighten him, unsettle him, distract him. This is why the philoso-
pher is constantly tempted to make everything explicit, to say everything
that can be said on the issue in question. Hence Christopher Ricks is
quite right to say that the ‘philosopher…can often be accused either of
overdescription or overargument or of inhabiting a world in which the
possibility of overdescription and overargument goes unimagined’ (Ricks
1998, 311). I do not think of such philosophy as an aberration, as I have
already said. We would be unrecognisable as the creatures we are without
it: it is a key way we have of coping with our own fear of ourselves. But
the difficulty as I see it is that it is what we do most easily, with most facil-
ity, when we conduct philosophy, that we slip into it thoughtlessly: it
seems inevitable or normal or natural. So it becomes unquestioned, rou-
tine—a betrayal of philosophy’s better possibilities. We need to be called
back to a philosophy in the subjunctive, reminded that such a philosophy
is possible, that it is a necessary corrective. It is a call to slow down, per-
haps to stop, to linger and not rush on, a call to live with the unsettling
and try to look at it more clearly without covering our eyes or running
away or on.
To return: it is, as I said, not clear what autobiography is, any more
than it is clear what philosophy is. Neither concept is particularly stable
in itself, let alone in its connections with the other. But I do not intend
this as a criticism of Cavell. It is, rather, that I am seeking to respond to
an invitation. It will be clear that I agree with Cavell that there are impor-
tant connections between philosophy and autobiography, and I have
tried to explore this issue in various ways in other things I have written,
and in my teaching, to which it is central, but I do not for one minute
suppose that Cavell took himself to have done anything more than raise
the question of what those connections might be; he is far too subtle a
thinker to imagine that he had settled anything in this regard. So this is
18 C. Hamilton
what I want to do here: I want to try to get a little better into focus my
sense of what the relations are between philosophy and autobiography.
My approach is twofold. In the rest of this introduction I intend to raise
some questions of a philosophical nature about autobiography. I shall do
so by trying to think about the notion of truth, the truthful telling of a
life, as we might hope or expect to find it in an autobiography. My aim is
simply this: to put pressure on the idea of what it might be to think of an
autobiography as being truthful, as telling the truth about a life. One can
think of this as a sketch of a philosophy of autobiography and I shall
propose a particular understanding of the concept of truth in autobio-
graphical works which allows us to suppose that (at least some) philo-
sophical texts could be thought of as autobiographies. The chapters that
follow this introduction form the second part of my approach. Here, I
aim to discuss a number of autobiographies, thinking in the case of each
text about the intertwining of the philosophical with the autobiographi-
cal, the personal, the story of the person writing the autobiography as
displayed in that text. I shall be trying to think about how the autobio-
graphical displays or explores or questions certain philosophical ideas or,
anyway, certain ideas as they are often expressed in philosophical texts—
ideas about the self or death or morality or loss and so on. Or one could
say that I shall be thinking about the investment these texts have in the
philosophical. And for these purposes I have chosen three autobiogra-
phies by philosophers and three by non-philosophers, hoping thereby to
get into sharper focus some of the multiple relations between philosophy
and autobiography on the assumption that those who are philosophers
are likely to be invested philosophically in autobiographical texts some-
what differently from those who write with a different background, likely
to have a different conception of, let us say, salience, or a different set of
inflections. But of course, that distinction—the distinction between phi-
losophers and non-philosophers—can only be provisional, since part of
my aim here, as I have been trying to make clear, is to wonder what we
might mean by ‘philosophy’ and, from that point of view, we might well
start to wonder why, say, we think of Sartre as a philosopher, but not
George Orwell. I hope through my discussions to do something to make
us feel that there is, in the end, not much that is terribly helpful in mak-
ing such a distinction. Or rather: we can make such a distinction only if
we hold to a certain conception of what philosophy is, of what a properly

philosophical conception of things is, or of what philosophy is in some
strict sense, and I intend to put pressure on just that. But in the individ-
ual chapters I do not wish to labour that point, for to labour it would be,
I think, to risk falling into something that someone (I myself, for exam-
ple) might (want to? be tempted to?) recognise as a strictly or properly
philosophical argument to the effect that we cannot really make sense of
the strictly or properly philosophical. Put it this way: if you write a piece
of philosophy that questions a particular conception of philosophy, you
have to stand partly outside that conception in order to get purchase on
the issue; if you stand inside that conception then the doubts about it will
seem to have no bite at all. But if you stand partly outside that concep-
tion, you risk finding that those inside it cannot or will not listen because
they will think you are not doing (what they recognise as) philosophy and
so will simply cheerily discount you. So I hope that my worries about
philosophy, as expressed in the six chapters, will be clear even as I try (not
always successfully) to leave things unlaboured. That is another way of
saying that I hope to silence no voices at all in what I write here; I want
to write in the subjunctive. And I want my worries about philosophy to
remain, at least some of the time, implicit, like creatures hidden in the
undergrowth whom we must know how to approach gently, cautiously,
delicately, if we wish to observe them without their running away from us.
So, very roughly speaking, what I wish to suggest in this introduction
is that philosophy can be autobiography. And then I wish to go on, in the
chapters that follow, to suggest ways in which autobiography can be
philosophy.
In the final chapter I explore some thoughts concerning the type of
autobiographies I have discussed.
* * *
How, then, are we to understand the kind of truth telling that is peculiar
to autobiographical writing? We know, of course, that there are plenty of
autobiographies whose aim is not to tell the truth, but, rather, to present
a self morally better, more interesting or eccentric, of greater sensitivity
20 C. Hamilton
and intelligence, more roguish or whatever than is or was the case in real-
ity. But there is no doubt that Genevieve Lloyd is right in remarking that
what we usually imagine is that an ‘[a]utobiography purports to present
the truth of a self as grasped by itself. It tries to present the self as an
object grasped from its own perspective, thus achieving a coincidence
between subjective and objective in the putative unity of the narrator and
the protagonist’ (Lloyd 1986, 170). But what is that truth, what is a
truthful presentation of the self in an autobiography?
There has been an enormous amount of work on the theory of autobi-
ography since the publication of in 1956 of Georges Gusdorf ’s ‘Conditions
et limites de l’autobiographie’, available in English since 1980 (Gusdorf
1980). The modern autobiography is often supposed to have arisen, in
particular, with Rousseau’s Confessions, although there is a general agree-
ment that the autobiography can be traced back as far at least as Augustine’s
Confessions. The terrain is pretty well tilled by now, with, for example,
feminist approaches suggesting (amongst other things) that the identity
of female autobiographers is and ought to be understood in relational
terms, the identity in question not being that of an autonomous indi-
vidualistic selfhood, the self, as one might suppose, of Enlightenment
individualism and typical of the ‘male’ autobiographical approach—a
point to which I shall return later in a somewhat different form as apply-
ing to both men and women. The distinction in question is certainly too
sharply drawn, as Paul John Eakin has pointed out (Eakin 1999, 50ff.),
but there is no doubt that the field has been invigorated by the discus-
sions in question. Then there are complex issues concerning what kind of
text is autobiographical anyway: as James Olney says, there are cases such
as that of Tolstoy where
A Confession and The Death of Ivan Ilyich present themselves as virtually the
same work—metaphoric representations of one and the same experience
and consequent vision—while bearing titles that would identify one as an
autobiography, the other as a piece of fiction and a work of art.
(Olney 1980, 9)
There is also Nietzsche’s well-known related claim that ‘every great phi-
losophy hitherto…[has been] the confession on the part of its originator
and a type of unintended and unnoticed memoir’ (Nietzsche 1988b

[1886], §6). Yet, even if Nietzsche is right, it can hardly be denied that
philosophical texts (usually? often?) look non-autobiographical, just as, of
the two texts mentioned by Tolstoy, one looks fictional, the other not.
However, despite the high philosophical and psychological interest of
such issues, generally speaking, as Christopher Cowley has noted (Cowley
2014), philosophers have been less interested in autobiography and a
fortiori the question of truth in autobiography than one might have
hoped or expected. Theoretical reflection has often been left to those
approaching the issues concerned from a background in literary studies.
That is, there has been surprisingly little direct, systematic interest from
philosophers in autobiography. Philosophical interest in such matters has
normally been indirect, through, for example, the investigation of such
issues as the narrative nature of the self, self-deception and the like. And
this is so despite the fact that there are a number of outstanding autobi-
ographies written by philosophers, such as Augustine’s Confessions or
Mill’s Autobiography.
It is, indeed, with respect to Mill’s Autobiography that Martin Warner—
who is one of those philosophers who are interested in the question of
truth in the context of autobiographical works—has indicated one major
problem that such a type of writing might have for delivering the truth.
He argues that the autobiographical self might accept, and write in the
light of, a theory about the how to arrive at the truth, which theory might
seem to us, the readers, to have the opposite effect, that is, to block access
to the truth about the life being explored. Warner suggests, as I have inti-
mated, that we see this in the case of Mill’s Autobiography. As is well
known, Mill sought in that work to show that his early intense cultiva-
tion of intellectual concerns, which left his emotional life desiccated,
could be rectified, indeed in his case was rectified, by showing how, in the
human mind, ‘one form of “cultivation” can be “joined to” and “balanced
by” others, which thereby provide “complements and correctives”, and by
such additions enable the mind to press forward through “successive
phases”’ (Warner 2016, 115). Warner argues, amongst other things, that
what Mill’s autobiographical writing shows is that he remained emotion-
ally immature and that he was himself unable to see this, in part on
account of the ‘empiricist, associationist and developmental theory of
22 C. Hamilton
mind’ (Warner 2016, 110) to which he was committed. Warner makes

clear that this does not show the model to be false. ‘But’, he goes on
Mill’s apparent lack of self-awareness prevents his Autobiography from add-

ing any plausibility to that model, and the way his theory seems to help
him hide from himself his own deficiencies encourages thoughtful readers
to ask, reflexively, how far they could use such a model in telling the truth
about their own lives. (Warner 2016, 116)
Warner’s point is well taken and provides a general warning against too
ready an embracing of a theory of the mind in the pursuit of what is
surely one of the central aims of autobiography, namely, self-knowledge.
But there are other problems for truth in autobiographical writing.
One issue is put in very stark terms by Francis Stuart, whose own writing
is often deeply autobiographical whilst being presented in the form of
novels: ‘What I find is that if I write about certain memories and then try
and recall them later, what I remember is what I’ve written about them’
(Stuart 2014). In part, what is in question here is that the self that nar-
rates relates from the perspective of the moment of narration, and that
means, obviously enough, that what it claims about the past can only ever
be the-past-from-the-present-point-of-view. That certainly does not con-
demn the narration to falsity in any straightforward way, but it compli-
cates the notion of truth: since the narrating self has been shaped by the
events it is exploring, it is necessarily in a crucial way different from the
self that underwent those events, and will bring a different sense, however
subtly altered, of what they were to the narration from the sense that the
self undergoing them, at the moment of doing so, could have had of
them. Our subjection to time is, from that point of view, the blessing and
the curse of the autobiographer, since without time there would be no
self to relate, and with time the narration must necessarily appear frus-
tratingly elusive, at least to some extent or in some respects. Augustine
may have been especially assailed by such frustration, as Lloyd points out
(Lloyd 1986, 171ff.), since he compared his own temporality to the eter-
nal stillness of God where truth was to be found, but the problem clearly
applies in a secular context as well.
This problem is well documented in the literature. For example, at the

outset of his book Hermann Hesse’s Fictions of the Self: Autobiography and
the Confessional Imagination, Eugene Stelzig reports the view of Georg
Misch that in an autobiography ‘the contents of consciousness are not
reproduced mechanically, but re-experienced, reshaped according to con-
ditions of the present state of mind’, so that an autobiography ‘can only
express the author’s present understanding of life’ (Stelzig 1988, 6).
Again, Stelzig quotes Gusdorf ’s claim, originally derived from a com-
ment of Jules Lequier’s, that the writing of an autobiography is a matter
of faire et en faisant se faire—making, and in making, making oneself
(Stelzig 1988, 7), which, Gusdorf says, ‘ought to be the motto of autobi-
ography’ (Gusdorf 1980 [1956], 44). The issue here is not one of deliber-
ate falsification or of mendacity concerning the facts of a life. It is related,
rather, to Kierkegaard’s well-known comment that we live forwards but
understand our lives backwards. This fact means that looking back across
a life, as in an autobiography, is bound to involve misrepresentation in
one way or another because earlier events come to have a certain meaning
in the light of later ones, a meaning that they could not have had at
the time.
Consider in this context a striking comment made by Kafka in his
diary on 2 August 1914: ‘Germany has declared war on Russia.—
Afternoon, swimming lessons.’ Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer com-
ment on this as follows:
This is simply an especially striking example of the way in which events

that the world has later learnt to evaluate as historical only seldom were
seen in this way at the first time of their arising and origin. If they are even
noticed, then they are so as part of everyday life in which infinitely more is
perceived and demands attention. (Sönke and Welzer 2011, 27)
What Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer say here concerning historical
events clearly also applies to the events of an individual life. From the
later vantage point of the autobiographer, some event may seem replete
with meaning when, at the time it occurred, there was little to remark in
it, and its selection and exploration in an autobiography will reflect this
later understanding. And even if it is true, as it no doubt is, that there are
24 C. Hamilton
events in a person’s life that at the time of their occurrence strike him or
her as significant or replete with meaning in some way, what that mean-
ing is will seem now subtly, now radically, different from the vantage
point of the later autobiographer, since it will have worked its way out
across a life in ways that could not, or could barely, be seen or anticipated
at the time of its occurrence.
Consider in this context a moment from Rousseau’s Confessions. In
Book Seven, there is a moment about which Rousseau says that ‘[i]f there
is one incident in my life that portrays my nature in its true colours, it is
the one I am about to relate…Whoever you are, who aspire to know a
fellow-man, read, if you dare, the two or three pages that follow; you are
about to know in full J-J. Rousseau’ (Rousseau 2008 [1789], 311).
Rousseau relates how he entered the rooms of a courtesan, Zulietta,
whom he describes in such terms as to leave the reader in no doubt that
he finds her overwhelmingly appealing, so beautiful does she appear in
his eyes: he is filled with longing for her. However, as he rushes to con-
summate his desire, he is suddenly struck, he tells us, ‘by a mortal chill’,
so great as to reduce him to tears and make his legs give way. ‘I sat down
and wept like a child.’
What, he asks, could be the reason of this reaction? He is sure it is not
that she carries a disease, but his sudden sense of her as a cheap whore,
available to anyone, must be provoked by something. Continuing his
intimacies with her, he discovers the cause: she has a blind or inverted
nipple (un téton borgne). ‘I suddenly saw, as clear as day,’ he reports, ‘that
instead of the most charming woman I could possibly imagine, what I
was holding in in my arms was a sort of monster, a reject of nature, of
men, and of love’ (Rousseau 2008 [1789], 312).
Now, whatever else we say about Rousseau’s reaction, what is surely
clear is that it could not have had the significance for him when it
occurred that it had later. The reason for this is that, however devastating
he found the experience at the time, it could only be the incident in his
life that he thought able to reveal his true nature fully in the light of the
fact that later in his life this sense was not given to him by some other
incident. In other words, even if, as is surely doubtful anyway, that the
significance of the encounter with Zulietta struck him at the time as
being the most revelatory event of his life concerning his character, that
event could only retain that meaning for him because it was supplanted
by nothing in his later life that was able to be revelatory in this way. And
that means that its meaning when Rousseau writes about it could not be
the meaning it had at the time of its occurrence: its being placed in the
context of the later events of his life casts those events in a certain light as
they must cast the encounter with Zulietta in a certain light. Moreover,
in any case, as I have already intimated, it stretches credibility to suppose
that Rousseau experienced the encounter with Zulietta in the terms prof-
fered in the autobiography. His later sense of it as so revelatory is surely a
later interpretation as he mulls over what it could all have meant.
None of this is to claim, of course, that what Rousseau says is in any
straightforward sense false. No doubt he really did think the incident
with Zulietta significant in the way he describes. We can, in any case, give
him the benefit of the doubt. It is rather that, in seeing it this way, he is,
to use the formulation mentioned earlier, reshaping it according to the
exigencies of his state of mind as he writes his autobiography, reflecting
not simply on this incident but on all of those of his life that strike him
as significant in one way or another.
We might add to these difficulties the notorious fallibility of memory,
so movingly explored by Primo Levi in his final autobiographical assault
on trying to understand the meaning of the Holocaust: ‘even under nor-
mal conditions’, he writes, seeking to draw a general lesson from his expe-
riences in the highly particular conditions of Auschwitz, ‘a slow
degradation [of memories] is at work, an obfuscation of the outlines, a
physiological oblivion, so to speak, which few memories resist’ (Levi
2007 [1986], 14). Even with a genuine desire to record the past as it was
in an autobiography, one is assailed by the unreliability of memories, the
human memory of each of us resembling, as Stuart Hampshire has sug-
gested, a compost heap, in which ‘all the organic elements, one after
another as they are added, interpenetrate each other and help to form a
mixture in which the original ingredients are scarcely distinguishable,
each ingredient being at least modified, even transformed, by later ingre-
dients’ (Hampshire 1989, 121).
In addition to these problems there is the fact that an autobiography
will recast the life of the subject in something of the model of a literary
figure, but that, as Peter Lamarque (Lamarque 2007) has argued, our
26 C. Hamilton
lives are significantly different from those of characters in a literary fic-

tion, at least that kind of fiction that Lamarque seems to have uppermost
in his mind, that is, the type exemplified by the classical realist nineteenth
century novel, such as those by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens.
Lamarque’s argument for this claim is fairly long and complicated, but,
roughly speaking, he argues that a piece of literature is created by its
author with aesthetic and moral concerns in mind, and the elements of
the work are structured and organised in such a way as to subserve this
aesthetic and moral design. Nothing is out of place or accidental. In our
lives, however, there is no such organisation and much that is random or
a matter of chance, having no purpose, let alone one that works in the
service of an overall pattern or organisation. Moreover, although we each
have a personality, as does a fictional character, in the latter case the aes-
thetic form of presentation is part of what our attention is drawn to in
the text, and this is clearly unlike the nature of personality in the
real world.
It is worth pausing a moment over this. Apart from the fact that we
forget a great deal of what happens to us and what we do, that our exis-
tence is in this sense, as Peter Goldie has said, ‘massively “gappy”’ (Goldie
2014, 164), our lives are also punctuated by inconsequentialities and
boredom, banalities and empty moments. Further, our projects in general
are fulfilled only partially: our conception of the finality at which we aim
is always more than we achieve, in that our understanding of what might
be possible outstrips the reality of what emerges: a book, a marriage, a
friendship, a career always promises more than it can give. From the
inside perspective, our lives are much more chaotic, less ordered and
much more confused than they ever appear in a telling or retelling. As
Virginia Woolf puts it:
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind

receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved
with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower
of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the
life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the
moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a
free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he
must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon conven-
tion, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or
catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on
as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps
symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent enve-
lope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
(Woolf 2008 [1919], 9)
It is no doubt for such reasons that, in a review of Oliver Sacks’ auto-

biography, On the Move, Will Self quotes Sacks’ claim that ‘Each of
us…constructs and lives a “narrative” and is defined by this narrative’ and
then comments: ‘[P]ersonally I think it’s only the social being that is nar-
rated—to ourselves we are always “such stuff as dreams are made of ”’
(Self 2015). There is clearly much truth in what Self says: the narrative of
a life offered in an autobiography cannot but smooth out or ignore much
of the emptiness, confusion and banality of a life. This is not, or need not,
be for reasons of mendacity, but simply because it would be impossibly
stifling, indeed impossible, to capture all this in a telling of the life. A told
life will always be more coherent than the life itself is.
So far, then, we have strong reasons for finding autobiographical writ-
ing problematic with respect to the truth we take it to be aiming to tell.
Nonetheless, all the reasons offered thus far for supposing this leave intact
the notion of agency. That is, the problem attends the recording of the
life, not anything internal to the agent’s own life. Even the degradation of
memories of which Levi speaks does not affect that, unless that degrada-
tion becomes something we think of as fit subject for medical interven-
tion or the like, as in the degeneration of memories associated with such
illnesses as Alzheimer’s disease. In other words, the problem here con-
cerns the capacity of a person to tell his or her story. It is not one that
concerns the authorship of the life itself. On the view in question, I am
the author of my life as I live it, even if, when I turn to seek to become
the author in the sense of attempting in an autobiography to recount the
truth of my life, I cannot but come up short. But Hannah Arendt sug-
gests that I am not the author of my life as I live it. She writes:
28 C. Hamilton
The disclosure of… ‘who’ [one is] through speech, and the setting of a new
beginning through action, always falls into an already existing web…
Together they start a new process which eventually emerges as the unique
life story of the newcomer, affecting uniquely the life stories of all those
with whom he comes into contact. It is because of this already existing web
of human relationships, that action almost never achieves its purpose…
Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human
world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his
own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of speech and action,
reveal an agent, but this agent is not the author or producer. Somebody
began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor
and sufferer, but nobody is its author. (Arendt 1958, 184)
Arendt has in mind here what one might call a decentred conception
of agency. Acting on and through each of us, expressed by us without our
knowing it at any given time, are historical, political, social and cultural
forces whose nature we do not understand and which we can barely influ-
ence. As I write this piece of work here and now I am the product of a
world that has made such writing possible, a world in which I have ben-
efited from a particular education system, from political and social stabil-
ity, from material comforts, from systems of healthcare, from the
availability of books and enough time in which to read them, and from
much else whose nature and history I hardly grasp and over which I have
nothing worth thinking of as influence, so small am I in the totality of
the political and social movements that make up the time and place in
which I live. Further, the nature of these monumental forces themselves
and how to understand them, is elusive: sociology, anthropology, philos-
ophy, psychoanalysis give competing and often incompatible accounts of
them. From the inside, it is true, things do not seem like this. As I write
this piece of work, it seems from my inner perspective that my agency is,
so to speak, much more circumscribed than this, that things depend
more directly on me than on the surrounding world. But I am suggesting
that this perspective is in tension with that from which I am clearly a
product of the peculiar social and cultural conditions obtaining at the
time of my birth and prevailing during my life. The point is made mov-
ingly by John Berger in reflecting in his biography of the medical doctor
John Sassall on the uneducated people amongst whom Sassall lived and
whom he treated. Seeking to undermine a certain kind of snobbery about
such people, Berger writes that it is easy to suppose that his interpretation
of them as individuals with a sensibility of high complexity is mistaken
precisely because they cannot express themselves. We are, he says, subject
to accepting
the false view that what people cannot express is always simple because they
are simple. We like to retain such a view because it confirms our own bogus
sense of articulate individuality, and because it saves us from thinking
about the extraordinarily complex convergence of philosophical traditions,
feelings, half-realized ideas, atavistic instincts, imaginative intimations,
which lie behind the simplest hope or disappointment of the simplest per-
son. (Berger 2016 [1967], 112)
Or again, Berger later asks, trying to get at the root causes of Sassall’s
depression and seeking to draw a lesson from elsewhere: ‘[D]o we appre-
ciate, for example, how much Van Gogh’s inner conflicts reflected the
moral contradictions of the late nineteenth century? Vulnerability may
have its own private causes, but it often reveals concisely what is wound-
ing and damaging on a much wider scale’ (Berger 2016 [1967], 146).
The issue is, indeed, put very starkly by Virginia Woolf in her memoir
of her own life (Woolf 2002). Thinking about what it is that she finds
unsatisfactory in memoirs and autobiographies, she speaks of ‘the invisi-
ble presences [that]…play such an important part in every life’, and she
mentions ‘the consciousness of other groups impinging upon ourselves;
public opinion; what other people say and think’. She goes on to say that
it is by such invisible presences that the ‘subject of this memoir’ is tugged

this way and that every day of his life; it is they that keep him in position.
Consider what immense forces society brings to play upon each of us, how
that society changes from decade to decade; and also from class to class;
well, if we cannot analyse these invisible presences, we know very little of
the subject of the memoir…I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held
in place; but cannot describe the stream. (Woolf 2002, 92)
30 C. Hamilton
Michel Serres has said that the human body is a kind of knot in the
material world, a point at which the world meets itself and through which
it runs (Serres 1985). Whatever we make of that, the point I am making,
drawing on Arendt, might be expressed by saying that the individual
human mind is a point at which the prevailing social, cultural, political,
religious and other forces meet and through which they run. This does
not mean at all that individual agency is an illusion, for as those forces
meet in, and run through, any given individual, they take on particular
form or shape in that individual. But it means that such agency is, as I
said earlier, decentred and needs to be understood as it expresses the
forces by which it is surrounded in its own particular way. I am not the
author of my life; I am only its co-author.
What this suggests is that autobiographical writing will tend to unre-
alistic conceptions of agency insofar as it omits or unacceptably down-
plays the decentred nature of the individual. How or when that happens
will be a different matter in each individual instance and needs to be
judged on a case-by-case basis. Nonetheless, I think it is true that, in
general, autobiographical writing tends by and large to miss this concep-
tion of agency and, to that extent, feeds an at best misleading conception
of the human agent. It is no doubt for some such reason that Paul John
Eakin calls for ‘a notion of autobiography in which the focus is, paradoxi-
cally, on someone else’s story’ (Eakin 1999, 56). I would say that that
someone else might also be in the social, political and cultural world in
which the subject of the autobiography exists.
Still, autobiographical practice can seek to respond to a sense of the
exposure of agency to forces beyond it of the kind I have indicated.
Perhaps this, or something like this, is seen, for example, in Rousseau. In
a discussion of Rousseau’s Confessions, William C. Spengemann has
this to say:
Rousseau locates his true origin in what he calls ‘Nature’—that absolute,

noumenal reality which occupies the place of God in the Enlightenment
cosmos and manifests itself in whatever material or psychological phenom-
enon (mountains, feelings) may be supposed to have escaped the corrupt-
ing touch of unnatural human society. [He is thus i]mpelled in one
direction by his historical intention to trace through the succession of his
experiences the evolution of his socially unique character, and in an exactly

opposite direction by his philosophical desire to discover in the same expe-
riences evidence of his transcendent ‘Natural’ soul. (Spengemann 1980, 63)
We may or may not agree with Rousseau’s understanding of nature as

its being some ‘absolute, noumenal reality’, but he has, I think, correctly
seen that any telling of the self must take account of the external forces
that shape it, forces that may well be recoverable for inspection from the
inner perspective as partly constituting that perspective only with great
difficulty or perhaps not at all.
So, if no one is the author of his life what this means is that we have to
think of individual agency as displaced or dispersed into the social world
in which it exists and reflect on what that displaced agency is in any give
case. This is one reason—in addition to those rehearsed earlier concern-
ing stylisation and the like—why there will always be (in principle)
unlimited retellings of the life that seek to get clear on its truth, its mean-
ing, everything depending here on the teller’s sense of what to select,
emphasise, disregard in the immense multiplicity of factors social, cul-
tural, political, religious and so on that converged on making the life
what it was.
There is a further aspect here: the fact of human mortality and what
that implies for the authorship of a life and the relating of a life. The most
helpful way in which this is expressed that I know is put by Berger in his
biography of Sassall, which will help us see what is at stake in these mat-
ters in the case of autobiography.
Berger draws an analogy between a painting and a person’s life. A
painting, he says, that you saw last week when the artist was alive is not
the same painting as that you see this week when he is dead (although it
is the same canvas). Berger writes:
While the artist is alive we see the painting, although it is clearly finished,
as part of a work in progress. We see it as part of an unfinished process. We
can apply epithets to it such as: promising, disappointing, unexpected.
When the artist is dead, the painting becomes part of a definitive body of
work. The artist made it. We are left with it. What we can think or say
about it changes. It can no longer be addressed to the artist…The subject
32 C. Hamilton
for discussion is no longer his unknown intentions, his possible confu-

sions, his hopes, his ability to be persuaded, his capacity for change: the
subject now is what use we have for the work left us. (Berger 2016
[1967]), 160–1)
Berger points out that this is the same with a life. The biographer can
write before or after the subject’s death, but what that life is is different
depending on whether the subject is dead or not. The text becomes some-
thing different once the subject is dead. If the biographer writes the story
of someone’s life and finishes it the day before the subject dies, the mean-
ing of the life, and the meaning of the text, changes from one day to the
next: now the subject can do nothing, say nothing, and nothing can hap-
pen to him that is not what we make happen to him in telling the story
of his life. That means that our sense of what his life amounts to, of what
we read in the text, is changed irrevocably by the finality reached in death.
As Berger puts it:
And so, if Sassall were dead, I would have written an essay that risked far
less speculation…[W]hen writing about him I would not have been
aware…of the process of his life continuing—unfixed, mysterious, only
half conscious of its own ends. If he were dead, I would conclude this essay
as death concluded his life. (Berger 2016 [1967], 161)
So much for biography. An autobiography, of course, is necessarily a

piece of writing completed before the death of its author. That means that
death cannot be contained in the autobiography. But the death of the
writer makes of the written text something other than it was when the
author was alive, in a way parallel to the way in which this is true of
biography.
We can put the point this way. Walter Benjamin, commenting on the
claim made by Moritz Heimann that ‘a man who dies at the age of thirty-
five is at every point of his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-
five’, says:
Nothing is more dubious than this sentence—but for the sole reason that
the tense is wrong. A man—so says the truth that was meant here—who
died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a

man who dies at the age of thirty-five. (Benjamin 1999 [1968], 99)
Once dead, a person is always someone who died at that moment, in

that way, in this manner or spirit, and so on. That necessarily makes of his
or her life something other than it could ever have been for him or her.
The manner in which death concludes a life and the fact that that must
escape the subject as the finality it is casts the life in a light for us that it
could not for him or her. In this sense, then, too, authorship of the life
escapes the person living it.
The point I am making here is somewhat different from, though com-
plemented by, a similar point made by Stephen Mulhall. Drawing on the
work of Heidegger, Mulhall explores the idea that my death is not an
event in my life:
My mortality is not a matter of my life’s necessarily having one and only

one ending; it is a matter of every moment of my existence possibly being
the last such moment, and of my being unable to grasp what that might
mean—at least, in the sense in which I can grasp (can understand or imagi-
natively inhabit) the realization of any other existential possibility or narra-
tive event in my life (such as getting married, or winning the Booker Prize,
or mowing the lawn). I cannot grasp it from the inside, as it were (as some-
thing that will happen to me), and yet it (what?) looms over and constitu-
tively defines the character of every moment of the life that I do inhabit
from the inside, the life that is mine to own or to disown. (Mulhall
2013, 189)
What this means is that any autobiography comes up against a kind of

absence in which the self confronts something that it cannot fully grasp
about itself even as it cannot say what it is that it cannot grasp.
Mulhall’s point is certainly highly plausible, but, as I said, not quite the
same as that which I have made. Mine concerns the peculiar kind of final-
ity and meaning for my life that my death has for those left behind and
how this differs from any meaning my death—and so life—could have
for me; his concerns the inability of the self to grasp its own mortality.
34 C. Hamilton
They are, perhaps, different ways of seeking to grasp the same mystery
that is human mortality.
If what I have argued so far is correct, it seems clear that the problems
attendant upon autobiographies in terms of telling the truth about a life
are multiple and deep. Autobiographical writing, it seems, forever fails to
make good on its claim to be able to tell the truth, at least in any straight-
forward sense. It is no doubt for this reason that Roy Pascal made
this claim:
The value of an autobiography depends ultimately on the quality of spirit

of the writer. I do not mean, in a simple sense, the quality of truthfulness,
about which much more has to be said, and I do not mean the same quality
in all. I mean a capacity which differs according to the nature of the per-
sonality and life, and which succeeds in creating in us the consciousness of
the driving force of this life, what Montaigne calls a man’s ‘master form’.
(Pascal 2015, 19)
Warner quotes this and more from Pascal and then writes:
But this will hardly do as it stands. A propensity to deceive oneself or lie to

others bears directly on a person’s ‘quality of spirit’, and historical facts may
be of decisive importance here. Further, if one has no concern with the
accuracy of autobiographies ‘as historical documents’ it is unclear how one
is to distinguish between the projection of a ‘real self ’ and that of an ideal-
ized self upon the world. (Warner 2016, 96)
Nonetheless, Warner agrees, for the kinds of reasons already explored,

that in autobiography ‘design and truth may be in significant tension’
(Warner 2016, 97), even if, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he adds
a caveat to the effect that this is so in the case of ‘the philosophical auto-
biography’: there seems no evident reason for the qualification.
It seems to me, indeed, that Warner is right: in autobiographies, styli-
sation; a responsiveness to the demands of quality of writing, or pre-
sumed audience; the will, conscious or unconscious as the case may be, to
exonerate or justify, alternatively, to condemn or chastise; the unreliabil-
ity of memory and the shifting sense of the meaning of a person’s past;
the problems attendant on the notion of agency—all this will be in sig-

nificant tension with the imperative to tell the truth about the life. What
conclusions should we draw? Is it that there is no hope for an autobiog-
raphy to tell the truth about a life? Does autobiography collapse into a
form of fiction?
I think that that conclusion would be too precipitate. The correct one
should be, I think, that the truth about a life that any autobiography
seeks to tell will always be essentially contested. There may well be tellings,
recountings, of a life that are plainly false, but nothing can count as the
truth of the life. There is, I am arguing, something deeply aporetic in the
autobiographical project, that is, a commitment to displaying and explor-
ing the truth of a life, since the proffered truth can never be more than
one contested interpretation thereof and there is nothing that can be the
autobiography of a life that reveals its truth in some such way as to be
stable. Moreover, on the view I am offering, there is no reason to suppose
that the view I offer of my own life, even if I strive strenuously to tell the
truth about it, is necessarily more reliable than that offered by some-
one else.
It hardly needs to be said that we have arrived at a view that is deeply
unsettling, drawing our attention to a maddening elusiveness in the
recounting of a human life. Most of our naïve assumptions and hopes
about the autobiographical project—that with the will to honesty and
moral attention we might tell the truth about a life—turn out to be shat-
tered. But it is the struggle for truth about a life, a truth that necessarily
cannot be achieved but cannot simply be abandoned either as a goal, that
remains in autobiographical writing.
If what I have argued is correct, it turns out, then, that Pascal was more
nearly right than Warner supposed in saying that what we are after in
autobiographical writing is a sense of the spirit of the person in question,
what Gusdorf calls the ‘expression of inmost being’ (Gusdorf 1980
[1956], 44) and Montaigne a person’s ‘master form’. But it is a mistake to
think that this licenses deliberate falsification or the like. Nor does it
mean that the historical record of a person’s life, such as we have it,
becomes irrelevant. What it does mean is that, when we read an autobi-
ography, we have to bring as much as we can to it if we wish to judge of
its truth: our knowledge of human psychology in general; what we know
36 C. Hamilton
already about the subject in question, including the facts of his or her life;
our knowledge of other texts—philosophical, literary and so on; our
knowledge of the subject’s historical and cultural epoch; our feeling for
the style of the text; and so on. This, indeed, seems to me what we do
anyway, and we do so, if we wish to know the person in question, in
search of the spirit that animated his or her life, where the impact of any
omission or distortions of facts will be just one of the things to which we
need to be attentive in our reading. As Pascal said, the ‘value of an auto-
biography depends ultimately on the quality of spirit of the writer’—but
‘depending ultimately’ in this way does not mean ‘depending only’, and
neither, as I have said, does it mean that the historical record is irrelevant.
I think that this has another implication: if it is true that, ultimately,
what interests us in autobiography is the spirit of the person in question,
the ‘master form’, then it is indeed true that texts that we otherwise or
normally classify as being something other than autobiography might,
nonetheless, be credibly and sensibly thought of as autobiographical after
all. This need not mean that they are only autobiographical, that this is
all they are, but, if one thinks of, say, Spinoza’s ethics or Kant’s moral
philosophy, there can be no doubt that they express a certain human
spirit, different in each case, a spirit that can, I believe, reasonably form
part of what we may count as an autobiography of these individuals. Like
all such judgements as to what that spirit is, it can only be a tentative; but
the same is true of such a judgement that we make based on a text more
traditionally or usually thought of as autobiographical, as I have sought
to show. To that extent, Paul Valéry’s well-known comment finds sup-
port: ‘En vérité, il n’est pas de théorie qui ne soit un fragment, soigneusement
préparé, de quelque autobiographie.’ (‘In truth, there is no theory that is
not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography’). Philosophy
can be autobiography. For sure, it is certainly true that the mainstream of
the subject is very far from acknowledging that, even from taking it seri-
ously. Indeed, it is deeply invested in its denial. Is the philosopher fearful
of looking within?
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farmer said he could not take strangers into his barn in its present
state, as his summer’s cheese, and many other things, were lodged
there. “D—n your cheese,” replied Charlie; “do you think, old boy,
that I would lay down my honesty for your trash o’ cheese?” They
parted, and Charlie got permission from the gudewife for himself, as
there were no others with him. The farmer came home late, and
knew not that Charlie was there. In the morning when he went into
the barn, he was astonished to find it all in an uproar. Upwards of
twenty individuals—men, women, and children—were lying among
the straw. The wife was called upon to see what state the barn was in;
and the old man, in no very soft voice, railed at her for admitting
such a band. She replied that she would send them away quietly: and
this she did by giving them as much brose and milk as they could
take. On their departure, Charlie told him he was a mean old crab,
and that his wife was worth a hundred of him. However, he kept his
word as to the cheese, and nothing was touched.
In the market next day, a good deal of business was done in his
way; several pockets were picked, and a number of petty thefts
committed. Charlie being in the habit of dealing with respectable
merchants for horn spoons, he was one day in the shop getting
payment for a parcel. The money was counted down, but during the
time his wife was taking it up, the merchant turned to speak to some
one in the shop; the wife, on taking up the money, said she wanted
five shillings; the merchant said he was positive he laid down the
whole. She still insisted that she wanted five shillings, and the
merchant was determined to resist; on which Charlie interfered,
saying, “Come, come, ye limmer, down with the money; none of your
tricks here.”
At one time he took it into his head to enlist for a regiment in
India, with a party in Perth; he did very well until they were ordered
to join the regiment. All the recruits being assembled but Charlie, he
at last was found drinking in a public-house, but would not stir a
foot. The officer was got, and the party attempted, after fair means
had failed, to take him by force. They only got him the length of the
street, when he drew a short bludgeon from an inside pocket, and
laid about him from right to left, in such a way that the whole were
soon sprawling on the street, and he escaped. The officer, seeing
what kind of a character he was, desired the sergeant not to look
after him, as he would have nothing to do with him.
At all the fairs he was present with his gang. If any row
commenced he was sure to take a lead,—and whichever party he
joined were generally left masters of the field. One midsummer
market at Perth, a dreadful row got up between the weavers and the
farmer lads, hundreds of whom attended the market at that time.
Charlie and his friends joined the weavers; the streets were soon in a
perfect uproar; the chapmen’s stands were upset, and themselves
tumbled in the midst of their goods; sweeties and gingerbread were
scattered in all directions by the pressure of the contending parties;
and broken heads and faces were to be seen in abundance. The whole
fair was thrown into a dreadful state of confusion, until a party of
military were brought out, who at length succeeded in restoring
order; but Charlie and his friends were not to be found. Many
individuals lost their hats, &c., and got bruised bones and torn coats;
it was also discovered that many pockets had been picked during the
affray.
Charlie had often been convicted of theft, imprisoned, and
banished the county. He not unfrequently made his escape by
breaking out of prison; but was at length apprehended for horse
stealing; and during his confinement was put in irons, in one of the
strong cages in the old jail. During his imprisonment he was very
cheerful, often declaring they could have no proof against him; but a
short time convinced him of his folly. He was tried, found guilty, and
sentenced to be hanged. When brought out to execution, he was
attended by four artillerymen, for fear of resistance. He recognised
many of his old acquaintances in the multitude—particularly the
merchant with whom he dealt in spoons, and gave him a bow and a
wave of his hand. When the fatal hour approached he appeared quite
subdued, and submitted to his fate with calm resignation. After his
body was cut down it was conveyed to the grave by an immense
multitude; the coffin was opened and filled with quicklime, to render
it useless for the surgeon.
Charlie’s death was a severe loss to the gang; immediately after
this Charlie Brown, his brother-in-law, became leader. This fellow,
although not so large a man, was stout, firmly built, of great activity,
and, like Graham, had been frequently in the hands of the law, and
made shift to get clear, until at last the fiscal was determined to have
him. It being ascertained that he was in the neighbourhood, a party
of light dragoons was sent out with the officers, who traced him to
Auchtergaven. When he saw the party, he set off through the fields,
until fairly run down by two of the horsemen, and brought to Perth.
This desperate character had on him about eighty guineas; he was
charged with several crimes, convicted, and sent to Botany Bay for
life. After this the gang, who had for a long period infested the
country, dispersed, and was seldom heard of.—Traditions of Perth.
THE SNOWING-UP OF STRATH LUGAS;
OR, THE MATCH-MAKING LAIRD.
Jolly old Simon Kirkton! thou art the very high-priest of Hymen.
There is something softly persuasive to matrimony in thy contented,
comfortable appearance; and thy house,—why, though it is situated
in the farthest part of Inverness-shire, it is as fertile in connubial joys
as if it were placed upon Gretna Green. Single blessedness is a term
unknown in thy vocabulary; heaven itself would be a miserable place
for thee, for there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage!
Half the county was invited to a grand dinner and ball at Simon’s
house in January 1812. All the young ladies had looked forward to it
in joyous anticipation and hope, and all the young gentlemen, with
considerable expectation—and fear. Everything was to be on the
greatest scale: the dinner in the ancient hall, with the two family
pipers discoursing sweet music between the courses, and the ball in
the splendid new drawing-room, with a capital band from the county
town. The Duke was to be there with all the nobility, rank, and
fashion of the district; and, in short, such a splendid entertainment
had never been given at Strath Lugas in the memory of man. The
editor of the county paper had a description of it in type a month
before, and the milliners far and near never said their prayers
without a supplication for the health of Mr Kirkton. All this time that
worthy gentleman was not idle. The drawing-room was dismantled
of its furniture, and the floors industriously chalked over with
innumerable groups of flowers. The larder was stocked as if for a
siege; the domestics drilled into a knowledge of their duties; and
every preparation completed in the most irreproachable style. I
question whether Gunter ever dreamt of such a supper as was laid
out in the dining-room: venison in all its forms, and fish of every
kind. It would have victualled a seventy-four to China.
The day came at last,—a fine, sharp, clear day, as ever gave a bluish
tinge to the countenance, or brought tears to “beauty’s eye.” There
had been a great fall of snow a few days before, but the weather
seemed now settled into a firm, enduring frost. The laird had not
received a single apology, and waited in the hall along with his lady
to receive the guests as they arrived.
“My dear, isna that a carriage coming up the Brose-fit-knowe?
Auld Leddy Clavers, I declare. She’ll be going to dress here, and the
three girls. Anne’s turned religious; so I’m thinking she’s ower auld
to be married. It’s a pity the minister’s no coming: his wife’s just
dead; but Jeanie’ll be looking out for somebody. We maun put her
next to young Gerfluin. Elizabeth’s a thocht ower young; she can stay
at the side-table with Tammy Maxwell—he’s just a hobbletehoy—it
wad be a very good match in time.”
In this way, as each party made its appearance, the laird arranged
in a moment the order in which every individual was to be placed at
table; and even before dinner, he had the satisfaction of seeing his
guests breaking off into the quiet tête-à-têtes, which the noise and
occupation of a general company render sweet and secluded as a
meeting “by moonlight alone.” While his eye wandered round the
various parties thus pleasantly engaged, it rested on the figure of a
very beautiful girl whom he had not previously remarked. She sat
apart from all the rest, and was amusing herself with looking at the
pictures suspended round the room, apparently unconscious of the
presence of so many strangers. She seemed in deep thought; but as
she gazed on the representation of a battlepiece, her face changed its
expression from the calmness of apathy to the most vivid
enthusiasm.
“Mercy on us a’!” whispered the laird to his wife, “wha’s she that?
that beautiful young lassie in the white goon? An’ no’ a young
bachelor within a mile o’ her. Deil ane o’ them deserves such an
angel!”
“It’s a Miss Mowbray,” was the reply; “she came with Mrs
Carmichael,—a great heiress they say: it’s the first time she was ever
in Scotland.”
“Aha! say ye sae? Then we’ll see if we canna keep her among us
noo that she is come. Angus M‘Leod—na, he’ll no do—he’s a gude
enough lad, but he’s no bonnie. Chairlie Fletcher—he wad do weel
enough; but I’m thinking he’ll do better for Bell Johnson. ’Od,
donnered auld man, no to think o’ him before! Chairlie Melville’s the
very man—the handsomest, bravest, cleverest chield she could hae;
and if she’s gotten the siller, so much the better for Chairlie—they’ll
mak a bonnie couple.”
And in an instant the laird laid his hand on the shoulder of a young
man, who was engaged with a knot of gentlemen discussing some
recent news from the Peninsula, and dragging him away, said,—
“For shame, Chairlie, for shame! Do you no see that sweet, modest
lassie a’ by hersel? Gang up to her this minute—bide by her as lang as
ye can—she’s weel worth a’ the attention ye can pay her. Miss
Mowbray,” he continued, “I’m sorry my friend, Mrs Carmichael, has
left ye sae much to yoursel; but here’s Chairlie, or rather I should say,
Mr Charles, or rather I should say, Lieutenant Charles Melville, that
will be happy to supply her place. He’ll tak ye in to yer dinner, and
dance wi’ ye at the ball.”
“All in place of Mrs Carmichael, sir?” replied the young lady, with
an arch look.
“Weel said, my dear, weel said; but I maun leave younger folks to
answer ye. I’ve seen the time I wadna hae been very blate to gie ye an
answer that wad hae stoppit your ‘wee bit mou, sae sweet and
bonnie.’” Saying these words, and whispering to his young friend,
“Stick till her, Chairlie,” he bustled off, “on hospitable thoughts
intent,” to another part of the room.
After the introduction, the young people soon entered into
conversation; and, greatly to the laird’s satisfaction, the young
soldier conducted Miss Mowbray into the hall, sat next her all the
time of dinner, and seemed as delighted with his companion as the
most match-making lady or gentleman could desire. The lady, on the
other hand, seemed in high spirits, and laughed at the remarks of her
neighbour with the greatest appearance of enjoyment.
“How long have you been with Mrs Carmichael?”
“I came the day before yesterday.”
“Rather a savage sort of country, I am afraid, you find this, after
the polished scenes of your own land?”
“Do you mean the country,” replied the lady, “or the inhabitants?
They are not nearly such savages as I expected; some of them seem
half-civilised.”
“It is only your good-nature that makes you think us so. When you
know us better, you will alter your opinion.”
“Nay; now don’t be angry, or talk as all other Scotch people do,
about your national virtues. I know you are a very wonderful people
—your men all heroes, your peasants philosophers, and your women
angels; but seriously, I was very much disappointed to find you so
like other people.”
“Why, what did you expect? Did you think we were ‘men whose
heads do grow beneath their shoulders?’”
“No, I did not expect that; but I expected to find everything
different from what I had been accustomed to. Now, the company
here are dressed just like a party in England, and behave in the same
manner. Even the language is intelligible at times; though the laird, I
must say, would require an interpreter.”
“Ah, the jolly old laird! His face is a sort of polyglot dictionary—it
is the expression for good-humour, kindness, and hospitality, in all
languages.”
“And who is that at his right hand?”
“What? the henchman? That’s Rory M‘Taggart—he was piper for
twenty years in the 73d, and killed three men with his own hand at
Vimiera.”
“And is that the reason he is called the henchman?”
“Yes; henchman means, ‘the piper with the bloody hand—the
slaughterer of three.’”
“What a comprehensive word! It is almost equal to the laird’s
face.”
But here the laird broke in upon their conversation.
“Miss Mowbray, dinna be frightened at a’ the daft things the wild
sodger is saying to you.” Then he added, in a lower tone, “Chairlie
wad settle down into a douce, quiet, steady, married man, for a’ his
tantrums. It wad be a pity if a Frenchman’s gun should spoil his
beauty, puir fallow!”
The young lady bowed without comprehending a syllable of the
speech of the worthy host.
“Are you likely to be soon ordered abroad?” she said.
“We expect the route for Spain every day; and then huzza for a
peerage or Westminster Abbey!”
“Ah! war is a fine game when it is played at a distance. Why can’t
kings settle their disputes without having recourse to the sword?”
“I really can’t answer your question, but I think it must be out of a
kind regard for the interest of younger brothers. A war is a capital
provision for poor fellows like myself, who were born to no estate but
that excessively large one which the Catechism calls the ‘estate of sin
and misery.’ But come, I see from your face you are very romantic,
and are going to say something sentimental—luckily his Grace is
proposing a removal into the ball-room; may I beg the honour of
your hand?”
“Aha, lad!” cried the laird, who had heard the last sentence; “are ye
at that wark already—asking a leddy’s hand on sic short an
acquaintance? But folk canna do’t ower sune.”
The bustle caused by the secession of those who preferred
Terpsichore to Bacchus, lucidly prevented Miss Mowbray’s hearing
the laird’s observation, and in a few minutes she found herself
entering with heart and soul into the full enjoyment of a country
dance.
Marriages, they say, are made in heaven. Charles Melville devoutly
wished the laird’s efforts might be successful, and that one could be
made on earth. She was indeed, as the laird expressed it, “a bonnie
cratur to look at.” I never could describe a beauty in my life—so the
loveliness of the English heiress must be left to the imagination. At
all events, she was “the bright consummate flower of the whole
wreath” which was then gathered together at Strath Lugas; and even
Lady Clavers said that—
“Miss Mowbray’s very weel put on indeed, for sae young a lassie.
Her hair’s something like our Anne’s—only I think Anne’s has a wee
richer tinge o’ the golden.”
“Preserve us a’!” whispered the laird; “puir Anne’s hair is as red as
a carrot.”
“An’ dinna ye think her voice,” said her ladyship—“dinna ye think
her voice is something like our Jeanie’s—only maybe no sae rich in
the tone?”
“Feth, ma’am,” answered the laird, “I maun wait till I hear Miss
Mowbray speak the Gaelic, for really the saft sort o’ beautiful English
she speaks gies her a great advantage.”
“As ye say, Mr Kirkton,” continued her ladyship, who, like all great
talkers, never attended to what any one said but herself, “Jeanie has
a great advantage ower her; but she’s weel enough, for a’ that.”
In the meantime the young lady, who was the subject of this
conversation, troubled herself very little as to what Lady Clavers said
or thought on that occasion. I shall not on any account say that she
was in love, for I highly disapprove of such a speedy surrender to
Dan Cupid in the softer sex; but at all events she was highly delighted
with the novelty of the scene, and evidently pleased with her partner.
No scruple of the same kind restrains me from mentioning the state
of Charlie Melville’s heart. He was as deeply in love as ever was the
hero of a romance, and in the pauses of the dance indulged in various
reveries about love and a cottage, and a number of other absurd
notions, which are quite common, I believe, on such occasions. He
never deigned to think on so contemptible an object as a butcher’s
bill, or how inconvenient it would be to maintain a wife and four or
five angels of either sex on ninety pounds a year; but at the same
time, I must do him the justice to state, that, although he was a
Scotsman, the fact of Miss Mowbray’s being an heiress never entered
into his contemplation; and if I may mention my own opinion, I
really believe he would have been better pleased if she had been as
portionless as himself.
But time and tide wear through the roughest day; no wonder, then,
they wore very rapidly through the happiest evening he had ever
spent. The Duke and the more distant visitors had taken their leave;
“the mirth and fun grew fast and furious” among the younger and
better acquainted parties who were left; but, greatly to the
mortification of the young soldier, his partner was called away at the
end of a dance, just when he had been anticipating a delightful tête-
à-tête while the next was forming. With his heart nearly bursting
with admiration and regret, he wrapt her in her cloaks and shawls,
and in silent dejection, with only a warm pressure of the hand, which
he was enchanted to find returned, he handed her into Mrs
Carmichael’s old-fashioned open car, though the night was dark and
stormy,—and after listening to the last sound of the wheels as they
were lost among the snow, he slowly turned, and re-entered the ball-
room.
Their absence, to all appearance, had not been noticed by a single
eye,—a thing at which he, as a lover under such circumstances is
bound to be, was greatly surprised. “Blockheads!” he said, “they
would not see the darkness if the sun were extinguished at midday.”
And he fell into a train of reflections, which, from the expression of
his countenance, did not seem to be of a very exhilarating nature. In
about twenty minutes, however, after his return, he was roused by
the henchman, whom he had spoken of at dinner, who beckoned him
from the hall.
“The bonny cratur!—the bonny cratur!” he began,—“an’ sic a nicht
to gang hame in!—the stars a’ put out, the snaw beginning to drift,
and a spate in the Lugas! Noo, if auld Andrew Strachan, the Leddy
Carmichael’s coachman,—doited auld body, an’ mair than half fou’,—
tries the ford, oh, the lassie, the bonny lassie’ll be lost! an’ I’ll never
hae the heart to spend the crownpiece she slippit into my hand just
afore the dancin’!”
But what more the worthy henchman might have said must remain
a mystery to all succeeding time; for long before he had come to the
episode of the crown, Charles had rushed hatless into the open air,
and dashed forward at the top of his speed to overtake the carriage,
in time to warn them from the ford. But the snow had already formed
itself into enormous wreaths, which, besides impeding his progress,
interfered greatly with his knowledge of the localities; and he
pursued his toilsome way more in despair than hope. He shouted, in
the expectation of his voice being heard, but he heard no reply. He
stooped down to see the track of the wheels, but the snow fell so fast
and drifted at the same time, that it was quite undistinguishable,
even if the darkness had not been so deep. However, onwards he
pressed towards the ford, and shouted louder and louder as he
approached it.
The roaring of the stream, now swollen to a prodigious height,
drowned his cries, and his eyes in vain searched for the object of his
pursuit; far and near he directed his gaze, and felt a transport of joy
at the hope, which their absence presented, that they had gone round
by the bridge and were saved. He was about to return, when he
thought he heard, in a bend in the river, a little way down, a faint
scream above the roaring of the torrent. Quick as lightning he rushed
towards the spot, and hallooed as loud as he could. The shriek was
distinctly repeated, and a great way out in the water he saw some
substance of considerable size. He shouted again, and a voice replied
to him from the river. In an instant he had plunged into the stream,
and though it was rushing with great impetuosity, it was luckily not
so deep as to prevent his wading. And after considerable toil, for the
water was above his breast, he succeeded in reaching the object he
had descried from the bank. It was, indeed, Mrs Carmichael’s car,
and in it he had the inexpressible delight to find the two ladies,
terrified, indeed, but happily in full possession of their presence of
mind.
In a few hurried words, he desired them to trust entirely to him,
and begging the elder lady to remain quiet in the carriage, he lifted
the younger in his arms,—but in the most earnest language she
implored him to save her companion first, as she had such
confidence in herself that she was certain she could remain in the
carriage till he had effected his return. Pressing her to his heart in
admiration of such magnanimity, he laid her gently back, and lifting
Mrs Carmichael from her seat, he pushed desperately for the shore.
The water even in this short time had perceptibly risen, and on
reaching the bank, and depositing his burden in safety, he rushed
once more through the torrent, fearful lest a moment’s delay should
make it impracticable to reach the car. That light equipage was now
shaking from the impetuous attacks of the stream, and at the
moment when the fainting girl was lifted up, a rush of greater force
taking it, now unbalanced by any weight, forced it on its side, and
rolled it off into the great body of the river. It had been carried more
than fifty yards below the ford, without, however, being overturned,
and had luckily become entangled with the trunk of a tree; the horse,
after severe struggles, had been drowned, and his inanimate weight
had helped to delay the progress of the carriage. The coachman was
nowhere to be found. Meanwhile the three, once more upon the land,
pursued their path back to Strath Lugas. Long and toilsome was the
road, but cheered to the young soldier by the happy consciousness
that he had saved his “heart’s idol” from death. Tired, and nearly
worn out with the harassing nature of their journey and of their
feelings, they at length reached the hospitable mansion they had so
lately quitted.
The music was still sounding, the lights still burning brightly,—but
when old Simon Kirkton saw the party enter his hall, no words can
do justice to the horror of his expression. The ladies were consigned
to the attention of his wife. He himself took especial care of the hero
of the story; and after having heard the whole adventure, when the
soldier, refreshed, and in a suit of the laird’s apparel, was entering
the dancing room, he slapped him on the shoulder, and said—
“Deil a doubt o’t noo. If ye’re no laird o’ the bonny English acres,
and gudeman o’ the bonny English leddy, I’ve nae skill in spaein’,
that’s a’.”
The adventure quickly spread, and people were sent off in all
directions with lights, to discover, if possible, the body of the
unfortunate Andrew Strachan. After searching for a long time, our
friend the henchman thought he heard a voice close beside him, on
the bank. He held down his lantern, and, sure enough, there he saw
the object of their pursuit, lying at the very edge of the water, and his
body on the land! The water from time to time burst over his face,
and it was only on these occasions that an almost inarticulate grunt
showed that the comatose disciple of John Barleycorn was yet alive.
The henchman summoned his companions, and on attentively
listening to the groans, as they considered them, of the dying man,
they distinctly heard him, as he attempted to spit out the water
which broke in tiny waves over his mouth, exclaiming, “Faugh,
faugh! I doot ye’re changing the liquor—a wee drap mair whisky, and
a sma’ spoonfu’ o’ sugar.” The nodding charioteer had been ejected
from his seat on the first impetus of the “spate,” and been safely
floated to land, without perceiving any remarkable change of
situation. It is needless to say he was considerably surprised to
discover where he was on being roused by the henchman’s party.
“It’s my belief,” said Jock Stewart, the piper, “the drucken body
thocht he was tipplin’ a’ the time in the butler’s ha’! It wad be a gude
deed to let the daidlin’ haveril follow his hat and wig; and I’m
thinkin’ by this time they’ll be down about Fort-George.”
The weather was become so stormy, and the snow so deep, that it
was impossible for any one to leave the house that night. The
hospitable laird immediately set about making accommodation for
so large a party, and by a little management he contrived to render
everybody comfortable. The fiddlers were lodged in the barn, the
ladies settled by the half-dozen in a room, and a supply of cloaks was
collected for the gentlemen in the hall. Where people are willing to
be pleased, it is astonishing how easy they find it. Laughter long and
loud resounded through all the apartments, and morn began to stand
“upon the misty mountain-tops” ere sleep and silence took
possession of the mansion. Next day the storm still continued. The
prospect, as far as the eye could reach, was a dreary waste of snow;
and it was soon perceived, by those who were skilful in such matters,
that the whole party were fairly snowed-up, and how long their
imprisonment might last no one could tell. It was amazing with what
equanimity the intelligence was listened to; one or two young ladies,
who had been particularly pleased with their partners, went as far as
to say it was delightful.
The elders of the party bore it with great good-humour, on being
assured from the state of the larder that there was no danger of a
famine; and, above all, the laird himself, who had some private
schemes of his own to serve, was elevated into the seventh heaven by
the embargo laid on his guests.
“If this bides three days there’ll be a dizzen couple before Leddy-
day. It’s no possible for a lad and a lass to be snawed up thegither
three days without melting;—but we’ll see the night how it’s a’ to be
managed. Has onybody seen Mrs Carmichael and Miss Mowbray this
morning?”
But before this question could be answered the ladies entered the
room. They were both pale from their last night’s adventure; but
while the elder lady was shaking hands with her friends, and
receiving their congratulations, the eyes of her young companion
wandered searchingly round the apartment till they fell on Charles
Melville. Immediately a flush came over her cheek, which before was
deadly pale, and she started forward and held out her hand. He
rushed and caught it, and even in presence of all that company could
scarcely resist the inclination to put it to his lips.
“Thanks! thanks!” was all she said; and even in saying these short
words her voice trembled, and a tear came to her eye. But when she
saw that all looks were fixed on her, she blushed more deeply than
ever, and retired to the side of Mrs Carmichael. The scene passed by
no means unheeded by the laird.
“Stupid whelp!” he said, “what for did he no kiss her, an it were
just to gie her cheeks an excuse for growing sae rosy? ’Od, if I had
saved her frae drooning, I wadna hae been sae nice,—that’s to say,
my dear,” he added to his wife, who was standing by, “if I hadna a
wife o’ my ain.”
The storm lasted for five days. How the plans of the laird with
regard to the matrimonial comforts of his guests prospered, I have
no intention of detailing. I believe, however, he was right in his
predictions, and the minister was presented with eight several sets of
tea-things within three months. Many a spinster at this moment
looks back with regret to her absence from the snow-party of Strath
Lugas, and dates all her misfortunes from that unhappy
circumstance. On the fourth morning of their imprisonment the laird
was presented with a letter from Charles Melville. In it he informed
him that he dared not be absent longer, in case of his regiment being
ordered abroad, and that he had taken his chance and set off on his
homeward way in spite of the snow. It ended with thanks for all his
kindness, and an affectionate farewell. When this was announced to
the party they expressed great regret at his absence. It seemed to
surprise them all. Mrs Carmichael was full of wonder on the
occasion; but Miss Mowbray seemed totally unmoved by his
departure. She was duller in spirits than before, and refused to
dance; but in other respects the mirth was as uproarious, and the
dancing as joyous, as ever;—and in a day the snow was sufficiently
cleared away—the party by different conveyances broke up—and the
laird was left alone, after a week of constant enjoyment.
Four years after the events I have related, a young man presented
himself for the first time in the pump-room at Bath. The gossips of
that busy city formed many conjectures as to who and what he could
be. Some thought him a foreigner, some a man of consequence
incog.; but all agreed that he was a soldier and an invalid. He seemed
to be about six-and-twenty, and was evidently a perfect stranger.
After he had stayed in the room a short time, and listened to the
music, he went out into the street, and just as he made his exit by one
door, the marvels of the old beldames who congregated under the
orchestra were called into activity by the entrance, through the other,
of a young lady leaning on the arm of an old one. Even so simple an
incident as this is sufficient in a place like Bath to give rise to various
rumours and conjectures. She was tall, fair, and very beautiful, but
she also seemed in bad health, and to be perfectly unknown. Such an
event had not occurred at the pump-room for ages before. Even the
master of the ceremonies was at fault. “As near as he could guess, to
the best of his conjecture, he believed he had never seen either the
gentleman or the lady.”
While surmises of all kinds were going their rounds in this
manner, the gentleman pursued his walk up Milsom Street. His pace
was slow, and his strength did not seem equal even to so gentle an
exertion. He leant for support upon his walking-stick, and heard,
mingled with many coughs, a voice which he well knew, calling,—
“Chairlie—Chairlie Melville, I say! pull, ye deil’s buckie,—ugh—
ugh!—sic a confounded conveyance for a Highland gentleman. Ah,
Chairlie, lad,” said our old acquaintance the laird, who had now got
up to where his friend was standing, “sad times for baith of us. Here
am I sent here wi’ a cough that wad shake a kirk, ugh—ugh.—An’ the
gout in baith my feet,—to be hurled about in a chair that gangs upon
wheels,—ugh—ugh,—by a lazy English vagabond that winna
understand a word that I say till him.—An’ you,” and here the old
man looked up in the young soldier’s face—“Oh, Chairlie, Chairlie! is
this what the wars hae brocht ye to?—ugh—ugh—yer verra mither
wadna ken ye,—but come awa,—come awa to my lodgings in Pultney
Street, and tell us a’ about what ye’ve been doin’,—ugh—ugh,—my fit,
my fit,—pu’ awa’, ye ne’er-do-weel; turn about, and be hanged till ye,
—do ye no ken the road to Pultney Street yet? Come awa, Chairlie,
my man, dinna hurry.” And thus mingling his commands to his
chairman, with complaints of the gout to his friend, the laird led the
way to his lodgings.
Charlie’s story was soon told. He had shared in all the dangers and
triumphs of the last three years of the war. He had been severely
wounded at Waterloo, and had come to Bath with a debilitated frame
and a major’s commission. But though he spoke of past transactions
as gaily as he could, the quick eyes of the laird perceived there was
some “secret sorrow” which weighed down his spirits.
“An’ did ye meet with nae love adventure in your travels? For ye
maunna tell me a bit wound in the shouther would mak ye sae doun-
hearted as ye are. Is there nae Spanish or French lassie that gies ye a
sair heart? Tell it a’ to me, an’ if I can be of ony use in bringin’ it
about, ye may depend I’ll do all in my power to help ye.”
“No,” replied Charles, smiling at the continued match-making
propensities of his friend; “I shall scarcely require your services on
that score. I never saw Frenchwoman or Spaniard that cost me a
single sigh.” And here, as if by the force of the word itself, the young
man sighed.
“Weel, it must be some English or Scotch lassie then; for it’s easy
to be seen that somebody costs ye a sigh. I ance thocht you were in a
fair way o’ winnin’ yon bonny cratur ye saved frae the spate o’ the
Lugas; but ye gaed awa in such a hurry the plant hadna time to tak
root.”
“She was too rich for the poor penniless subaltern to look to,”
replied the young man, a deep glow coming over his face.
“Havers! havers! She wad hae given a’ her lands yon night for a
foot o’ dry grund. An’ as ye won her, ye had the best right to wear
her. And I’m muckle mista’en if the lassie didna think sae hersel.”
“Miss Mowbray must have overrated my services; but at all events
I had no right to take advantage of that fortunate accident to better
my fortunes, by presuming on her feelings of gratitude to her
preserver.”
“What for no? what for no?” cried the laird; “ye should hae
married her on the spot. There were eight couples sprang frae the
snaw-meeting—ye should hae made the ninth, and then ye needna
hae had a ball put through your shouther, nor ever moved frae the
braw holmes o’ Surrey. ’Od, I wish it had been me that took her out o’
the water; that is, if I had been as young as you, and Providence had
afflicted me with the loss o’ Mrs Kirkton.”
“If I had been on a level with her as to fortune”——
“Weel, but noo yer brither’s dead, ye’re heir o’ the auld house, an’
ye’re a major—what’s to forbid the banns noo?”
“I have never heard of Miss Mowbray from that hour to this. In all
probability she is married to some lucky fellow”——
“She wasna married when I saw Mrs Carmichael four months
since; she was in what leddies call delicate health though; she had
aye been melancholy since the time of the water business. Mrs
Carmichael thought ye were a great fule for rinnin’ awa.”
“Mrs Carmichael is very kind.”
“’Deed is she,” replied the laird, “as kind-hearted a woman as ever
lived. She’s maybe a thocht ower auld, or I dinna doubt she wad be
very happy to marry you hersel.”
“I hope her gratitude would not carry her to such an alarming
length,” said Charles, laughing. “It would make young men rather
tender of saving ladies’ lives.”
“If I knew where she was just now, I wad soon put everything to
rights. It’s no ower late yet, though ye maun get fatter before the
marriage—ye wad be mair like a skeleton than a bridegroom. But,
save us! what’s the matter wi’ ye? are ye no weel? headache? gout?
what is’t, man? Confound my legs, I canna stir. Sit down, and rest
ye.”
But Charles, with his eyes intently fixed on some object in the
street, gazed as if some horrible apparition had met his sight.
Alternately flushed and pale, he continued as if entranced, and then,
deeply sighing, sunk senseless on the floor.
“Rory, Rory!” screamed the laird—“ugh, ugh! oh, that I could get at
the bell! Cheer up, Chairlie. Fire! fire! ugh, ugh!—the lad will be dead
before a soul comes near him. Rory, Rory!”
And luckily the ancient henchman, Rory MacTaggart, made his
appearance in time to save his master from choking through fear and
surprise. Charlie was soon recovered, and, when left again alone with
the laird, he said—
“As I hope to live, I saw her from this very window, just as we were
speaking of her. Even her face I saw! Oh, so changed and pale! But
her walk—no two can have such a graceful carriage!”
“Seen wha?” said the laird. “Mrs Carmichael? For it was her we
were speaking o’—ay, she’s sair changed; and her walk is weel kent;
only I thocht she was a wee stiffer frae the rheumatism last year. But
whaur is she?”
“It was Miss Mowbray I saw. She went into that house opposite.”
“What! the house wi’ the brass knocker, green door—the verandah
with the flower-pots, an’ twa dead geraniums?”
“Yes.”
“Then just ring the bell, and tell that English cratur to pu’ me in
the wee whirligig across the street.”
“Impossible, my dear laird! recollect your gout.”
“Deil hae the gout and the cough too! Order the chair; I’ll see if it’s
her in five minutes.”
And away, in spite of all objections and remonstrances, went the
laird to pay his visit. Now, if any one should doubt of the success of
his negotiations, I—the writer of this story—Charles Melville, late
major, —th regiment, shall be happy to convince him of it, if he will
drop in on me any day at Mowbray Hall, by my own evidence, and
also that of my happy and still beautiful Madeline, though she is the
mother of three rosy children, who at this moment are making such
an intolerable noise that I cannot understand a sentence I am
writing. I may just mention, that the laird attended the wedding, and
that his cough entirely left him. He does not suffer an attack of the
gout more than once a year. He has adopted my second boy, and
every autumn we spend three months with him at Strath Lugas. Oh,
that all match-makers were as innocent and disinterested as jolly old
Simon Kirkton!—Blackwood’s Magazine.
EZRA PEDEN.
By Allan Cunningham.
I sat and watched while all men slept, and lo!

Between the green earth and the deep green sea
I saw bright spirits pass, pure as the touch
Of May’s first finger on the eastern hill.
Behind them followed fast a little cloud;
And from the cloud an evil spirit came—
A damnèd shape—one who in the dark pit
Held sovereign sway; and power to him was given
To chase the blessèd spirits from the earth,
And rule it for a season.
Soon he shed
His hellish slough, and many a subtle wile
Was his to seem a heavenly spirit to man.
First he a hermit, sore subdued in flesh,
O’er a cold cruse of water and a crust,
Poured out meek prayers abundant. Then he changed
Into a maid when she first dreams of man,
And from beneath two silken eyelids sent
The sidelong light of two such wondrous eyes,
That all the saints grew sinners. He subdued
Those wanton smiles, and grew a reverend dame,
With wintry ringlets, and grave lips, which dropt
Proverbial honey in her grandson’s ear.
Then a professor of God’s Word he seemed,
And o’er a multitude of upturned eyes
Showered blessed dews, and made the pitchy path,
Down which howl damnèd spirits, seem the bright
Thrice-hallowed way to heaven. Yet grimly through
The glorious veil of those seducing shapes
Frowned out the fearful spirit.
Chapter I.
The religious legend which supplies my story with the motto,
affords me no further assistance in arranging and interpreting the
various traditional remembrances of the colloquies between one of
the chiefs of the ancient Presbyterian Kirk and one of the inferior
spirits of darkness. It is seldom that tradition requires any
illustration; its voice is clear, and its language simple. It seeks to
conceal nothing; what it can explain it explains, and scorns, in the
homely accuracy of its protracted details, all mystery and
reservation. But in the present story, there is much which the
popular spirit of research would dread to have revealed;—a
something too mystical and hallowed to be sought into by a devout
people. Often as I have listened to it, I never heard it repeated
without mutual awe in the teller and the auditor. The most intrepid
peasant becomes graver and graver as he proceeds, stops before the
natural termination of the story, and hesitates to pry into the
supernatural darkness of the tradition. It would be unwise, therefore,
to seek to expound or embellish the legend,—it shall be told as it was
told to me; I am but as a humble priest responding from the
traditionary oracles, and the words of other years pass without
change from between my lips.
Ezra Peden was one of the shepherds of the early Presbyterian
flock, and distinguished himself as an austere and enthusiastic
pastor; fearless in his ministration, delighting in wholesome
discipline, and guiding in the way of grace the peer as well as the
peasant. He grappled boldly with the infirmities and sins of the
times; he spared not the rod in the way of his ministry; and if in the
time of peril he laid his hand on the sword, in the time of peace his
delight was to place it on the horns of the altar. He spared no vice, he
compounded with no sin, and he discussed men’s claims to immortal
happiness with a freedom which made them tremble. Amid the
fervour of his eloquence, he aspired, like some of his fellow-
professors of that period, to the prophetic mantle. Plain and simple
in his own apparel, he counted the mitred glory and exterior
magnificence of the hierarchy a sin and an abomination, and
preferred preaching on a wild hill, or in a lonesome glen, to the most
splendid edifice.

Philosophy and Autobiography Reflections On Truth Self Knowledge and Knowledge of Others Christopher Hamilton All Chapter

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Philosophy and Autobiography Reflections On Truth Self Knowledge and Knowledge of Others Christopher Hamilton All Chapter

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Philosophy and Autobiography:

Reflections on Truth, Self-Knowledge

Reflections on Truth, Self-Knowledge

ISBN 978-3-030-70656-2 ISBN 978-3-030-70657-9 (eBook)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com

I am extremely grateful to Brendan George and Rebecca Hinsley at

‘Walter Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um 1900: Longing, Enchantment

Opening: The voice off in Philosophy 1

 immense expenditure of energy come to nothing’:

A philosophical text is in many ways a gesture of control: the philoso-

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 1

bring conversation to an end by providing the kind of reasoned argu-

desire is, no doubt, an expression of an intellectual and emotional rest-

In his A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises, Stanley Cavell

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 9

It would, in any case, I suppose, be a temptation to think that we are

These are my experiences (not yours) and these things happened to me

We would not recognise ourselves without this voice, and it is certainly

Philosophers who shun the autobiographical must find another route to

Cavell is not arguing against what he calls philosophy’s arrogance, its

they do and say to be representative or exemplary of the human condi-

The autobiographical dimension of philosophy is internal to its claim that

Cavell is surely right about this: I cannot be sure in advance of writing

any authority, it might wonder if it could best do so through weakness

profound self-doubts on the writer’s part, dependent in large part on a

vulnerability, his fragility. Philosophy, from such a point of view, will be

we hold to a certain conception of what philosophy is, of what a properly

and a type of unintended and unnoticed memoir’ (Nietzsche 1988b

mind’ (Warner 2016, 110) to which he was committed. Warner makes

Mill’s apparent lack of self-awareness prevents his Autobiography from add-

This problem is well documented in the literature. For example, at the

This is simply an especially striking example of the way in which events

lives are significantly different from those of characters in a literary fic-

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind

It is no doubt for such reasons that, in a review of Oliver Sacks’ auto-

it is by such invisible presences that the ‘subject of this memoir’ is tugged

Rousseau locates his true origin in what he calls ‘Nature’—that absolute,

experiences the evolution of his socially unique character, and in an exactly

We may or may not agree with Rousseau’s understanding of nature as

for discussion is no longer his unknown intentions, his possible confu-

So much for biography. An autobiography, of course, is necessarily a

died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a

Once dead, a person is always someone who died at that moment, in

My mortality is not a matter of my life’s necessarily having one and only

What this means is that any autobiography comes up against a kind of

The value of an autobiography depends ultimately on the quality of spirit

But this will hardly do as it stands. A propensity to deceive oneself or lie to

Nonetheless, Warner agrees, for the kinds of reasons already explored,

the problems attendant on the notion of agency—all this will be in sig-

I sat and watched while all men slept, and lo!

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Opening: The voice off in Philosophy 1

immense expenditure of energy come to nothing’: