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His loud vigor is as pronounced as that of a later Scot like Carlyle; yet he stated long afterward that the likeness between himself and Roderick was slight and superficial. The fact that the tale is written in the first person also helps the autobiographic theory: that method of story-making always lends a certain credence to the narrative.
And perhaps in no case can it be achieved save in the autobiographic form of fiction, where and where alone the work is so subjective that it may bear even the poetic glow of ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Villette.’ What makes us think this to be so is the fact that in ‘Shirley’—a story written in the epic method—the only passages of the poetic kind which really convince are those uttered by the characters in their own persons.
Such traits of the autobiographic sort, from these Letters, as can serve to paint him or his life, and promise not to weary the reader, I must endeavor to select, in the sequel.
Reference to the passages already quoted will show that, in the whole corpus of autobiographic literature, there does not exist a volume in which the work of self-dissection has been so ruthlessly and completely undertaken and executed as in Cardan's memoirs.
The adventures of the beautiful Princess Rouletta were blood-curdling in the extreme, and the doings of her criminal associates were unmistakably autobiographic. Naturally Rouletta never felt free to repeat these stories, but it was not long before she began to look forward with avid interest to her nightly entertainment.
It were an immense service done to our best literature if some of Behmen's students would go through all Behmen's books, so as to make a complete collection and composition of the best of those autobiographic passages.
I am asked to jot down a few autobiographic odds and ends from such data of record and memory as I may retain. I have been something of a student of life; an observer of men and women and affairs; an appraiser of their character, their conduct, and, on occasion, of their motives.
But, most of the day, I must regard myself as a prisoner, with the entire freedom of his study a large airy room on the second floor, well furnished with all manner of books, old prints, strange fishes in glass cases, rods, guns, pipe-racks, curiosities of every kind from various parts of the world India, the South Seas, Australia, not forgetting London and Paris and all the flotsam and jetsam of a far-wandered man, who as the "King" remarked, introducing their autobiographic display with a comprehensive wave of his hand had, like that other wanderer unbeloved of all schoolboys, the pious Æneas, been so much tossed about on land and sea vi superum, sævæ memorem Junonis ob iram that he might found his city and bring safe his household gods from Latium.
To him therefore I give it with whatever other fartherances and elucidations may be possible, and I solemnly request of him to do his best and wisest in the matter, as I feel assured he will. There is incidentally a quantity of autobiographic record in my notes to this manuscript; but except as subsidiary and elucidative of the text I put no value on such.
He wrought in that fiction in such a fashion as to make the most of the particular class of Novel it represented: to wit, the first-person autobiographic picture of life. Given its purpose, it could hardly have been better done. It surely bears favorable comparison, for architecture, with Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," a work in the same genre, though lacking the autobiographic method.
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