She is the witness I am drawing this from. She has revealed it in her autobiography not intentionally, of course--I am not claiming that. An autobiography is the most treacherous thing there is. It lets out every secret its author is trying to keep; it lets the truth shine unobstructed through every harmless little deception he tries to play; it pitilessly exposes him as a tin hero worshipping himself as Big Metal every time he tries to do the modest-unconsciousness act before the reader. This is not guessing; I am speaking from autobiographical personal experience; I was never able to refrain from mentioning, with a studied casualness that could deceive none but the most incautious reader, that an ancestor of mine was sent ambassador to Spain by Charles I., nor that in a remote branch of my family there exists a claimant to an earldom, nor that an uncle of mine used to own a dog that was descended from the dog that was in the Ark; and at the same time I was never able to persuade myself to call a gibbet by its right name when accounting for other ancestors of mine, but always spoke of it as the “platform”--puerilely intimating that they were out lecturing when it happened.
It is Mrs. Eddy over again. As regards her minor half, she is as commonplace as the rest of us. Vain of trivial things all the first half of her life, and still vain of them at seventy and recording them with naive satisfaction--even rescuing some early rhymes of hers of the sort that we all scribble in the innocent days of our youth--rescuing them and printing them without pity or apology, just as the weakest and commonest of us do in our gray age. More--she still frankly admires them; and in her introduction of them profanely confers upon them the holy name of “poetry.” Sample:
“And laud the land whose talents rock The cradle of her power, And wreaths are twined round Plymouth Rock From erudition's bower.”
“Minerva's silver sandals still Are loosed and not effete.”
You note it is not a shade above the thing which all human beings churn out in their youth.
You would not think that in a little wee primer--for that is what the Autobiography is--a person with a tumultuous career of seventy years behind her could find room for two or three pages of padding of this kind, but such is the case. She evidently puts narrative together with difficulty and is not at home in it, and is glad to have something ready-made to fill in with. Another sample: