351

SAROJINI NAIDU 376

WELSH POETRY 390

SAINT AUGUSTINE

The _Confessions_ of St. Augustine are the first autobiography, and they
have this to distinguish them from all other autobiographies, that they
are addressed directly to God. Rousseau's unburdening of himself is the
last, most effectual manifestation of that nervous, defiant
consciousness of other people which haunted him all his life. He felt
that all the men and women whom he passed on his way through the world
were at watch upon him, and mostly with no very favourable intentions.
The exasperation of all those eyes fixed upon him, the absorbing, the
protesting self-consciousness which they called forth in him, drove him,
in spite of himself, to set about explaining himself to other people, to
the world in general. His anxiety to explain, not to justify, himself
was after all a kind of cowardice before his own conscience. He felt
the silent voices within him too acutely to keep silence. Cellini wrote
his autobiography because he heard within him such trumpeting voices of
praise, exultation, and the supreme satisfaction of a violent man who
has conceived himself to be always in the right, that it shocked him to
think of going down into his grave without having made the whole world
hear those voices. He hurls at you this book of his own deeds that it
may smite you into acquiescent admiration. Casanova, at the end of a
long life in which he had tasted all the forbidden fruits of the earth,
with a simplicity of pleasure in which the sense of their being
forbidden was only the least of their abounding flavours, looked back
upon his past self with a slightly pathetic admiration, and set himself
to go all over those successful adventures, in love and in other arts,
firstly, in order that he might be amused by recalling them, and then
because he thought the record would do him credit. He neither intrudes
himself as a model, nor acknowledges that he was very often in the
wrong. Always passionate after sensations, and for their own sake, the
writing of an autobiography was the last, almost active, sensation that
was left to him, and he accepted it energetically.

Probably St. Augustine first conceived of the writing of an
autobiography as a kind of penance, which might be fruitful also to
others. By its form it