Of Vanity

There is, perhaps, no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly. What the divinity has so divinely expressed ought to be carefully and continually meditated by understanding people, for it is against us all; but the humour of the time carries most men to decry it in others, and excessively to excuse it in themselves. I will not plead for myself — I am as vain as any; but I will say something in defence of my particular project, which many have been pleased to find especially frivolous.

They say: of what use is it to describe yourself? The world has no interest in your digestion or your moods. And I confess the charge. My digestion is unremarkable. My moods are common to the species. But this, I think, is precisely the point. In describing myself with some care and honesty, I describe a man — and all men recognise themselves in a man, if the portrait is true enough. It is not vanity that drives me to write, or not only vanity; it is the same impulse that drives a naturalist to describe a particular specimen of a particular bird. The particular is the way to the general.

Every man carries within himself the complete form of the human condition.

I have spent thirty years in this work, and I cannot say what it has made of me, except that it has made me look more carefully than I otherwise should have done. When a man sets himself down as his own subject, he cannot escape scrutiny — at least not for long. He begins with his opinions and discovers his contradictions; he begins with his virtues and discovers his pretexts; he begins with his biography and discovers that there is no such clean thing as a biography, only a scramble of sensations, decisions, and afterthoughts.

Those who say this is a waste of paper are not wrong about paper. But paper is cheap, and self-knowledge is not. I leave these essays as a testimony to one man who lived in a particular century with a particular mind and tried, with imperfect instruments, to see himself clearly. If posterity finds no use for them, they will have served me well enough in the writing.