It Is Difficult, Impossible I Am Told, For Any One To Recall His
Boyhood Exactly As It Was.
It could not have been what it seems to the
adult mind, since we cannot escape from what we are, however great our
detachment may be; and in going back we must take our present selves
with us:
The mind has taken a different colour, and this is thrown
back upon our past. The poet has reversed the order of things when he
tells us that we come trailing clouds of glory, which melt away and
are lost as we proceed on our journey. The truth is that unless we
belong to the order of those who crystallize or lose their souls on
their passage, the clouds gather about us as we proceed, and as cloud-
compellers we travel on to the very end.
Another difficulty in the way of those who write of their childhood is
that unconscious artistry will steal or sneak in to erase unseemly
lines and blots, to retouch, and colour, and shade and falsify the
picture. The poor, miserable autobiographer naturally desires to make
his personality as interesting to the reader as it appears to himself.
I feel this strongly in reading other men's recollections of their
early years. There are, however, a few notable exceptions, the best
one I know being Serge Aksakoff's _History of His Childhood;_ and
in his case the picture was not falsified, simply because the temper,
and tastes, and passions of his early boyhood - his intense love of his
mother, of nature, of all wildness, and of sport - endured unchanged in
him to the end and kept him a boy in heart, able after long years to
revive the past mentally, and picture it in its true, fresh, original
colours.
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