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.
And I can say of myself with regard to this primitive faculty and
emotion--this sense of the supernatural in natural things, as I have
called it--that I am on safe ground for the same reason; the feeling
has never been wholly outlived. And I will add, probably to the
disgust of some rigidly orthodox reader, that these are childish
things which I have no desire to put away.
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