_There_ no man has a right to
be trivial, or empty, or commonplace. Whatever is recorded must be
recorded worthily.
Take a plain example. If I set forth to describe my crossing Waterloo
Bridge on a particular day in a particular year, I must not merely on
that ground be attacked for triviality. I may be able to show, in the
first place, that the crossing by that bridge and not, let us say, by
using Hungerford Bridge or Blackfriars Bridge, affected my life. I may
also be able to describe my walk or drive in such a way that it will
make a deep impress upon the reader's mind. In a word, to get judgment
against me, the critic must demur, not on my facts but on a point of
literature, that is, on my method of presentation.
In considering the multitude of things which have gone to make me what I
am, which have drawn into a single strand the innumerable threads that
the Fates have been spinning for me ever since they began their dread
business, what strikes me most of all and first of all is my good
fortune. I may, on a future occasion, complain that in middle life and
in later life I did not have good luck, but bad luck, but I should be an
ingrate to Destiny if I did not admit that nothing could have been more
happy than the circumstances with which I was surrounded at my birth--
the circumstances which made the boy, who made the youth, who made the
man.
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