On Writing My Life
"If the account entertains, and perhaps here and there instructs the young and strengthens them in good principles, then I have not lived and written in vain"
"If the account entertains, and perhaps here and there instructs the young and strengthens them in good principles, then I have not lived and written in vain"
The awkwardness of an autobiography I know as well as anyone; and I do not consider myself important enough that my life should be described at all. At least, after forty years there would still be time enough. Some years ago, when the constellations on the literary sky were more favorable, a respected bookseller offered me a considerable sum if I would write the psychological history of my education. But I do not like to give myself over to such speculations; and it goes somewhat against my nature, at my own expense, to say a few general truths in a perhaps peculiar fashion—truths which half the world has long known, and the other half does not wish to know.
Nevertheless, the following has moved me to speak somewhat of myself. Already Herder(1), Gleim(2), Schiller(3), and Weiße(4), and several still living, encouraged me, in my own way, to set down in writing the circumstances of my life, which they thought more important than they truly were. I believed that the eightieth year would still be early enough; but my present state of health reminds me not to delay, if it is to be done at all. Several of my friends threaten me—quite likely with reason—that I would in any case not escape a biographer: and then I might fall into the hands of a botcher, or a hyper-critic, or even a flat, tasteless panegyrist.
No one can know better what is in and about a man than the man himself, if only he has the honesty of impartiality and the strength to show himself as he is. I leave it to anyone who knows something of me to judge whether what he knows bears the stamp of such impartiality and strength. I therefore tell my story honestly and openly, without sparing myself, and not seldom with the self-awareness of inward worth—yet without arrogance, and without further fearing the critics, who may afterward sit in judgment on me like on the dead. I shall have, no doubt, not a few and not small follies to confess; but, so far as I am conscious, no baseness. If the account entertains, and perhaps here and there instructs the young and strengthens them in good principles, then I have not lived and written in vain.