IX

A THEME WITH VARIATIONS

"I expose myself entire: 'tis a body where, at one view, the veins, muscles and tendons are apparent, every of them in its proper place; here the effect of a cold; there of the heart beating, very dubiously. I do not write my own acts, but myself and my essence.... Because Socrates had alone digested to purpose the precept of his god, 'to know himself,' and by that study had arrived at the perfection of setting himself at nought, he only was reputed worthy the title of a sage."

A Theme With Variations

§ 80

Theliterary artist plays, I had said, at the game of perpetuating, not merely (as did the painter of Queen Radegonde) his personal notions, but also his own personality....

To me that seemed a secondary consideration. Yet that was, I took it, the main tenet of the Economists and of the creed which John Charteris had elsewhere expounded. Kings and prime ministers and admirals and czars and popes and bank-presidents all shrivelled with the passing of time, as I had said earlier, into some uncarnate quality, uncertainly remembered. But writers here and there did attain to a sort of terrestrial immortality as rounded, actual human beings. The lyric poet bequeaths to us like a legacy his personal emotion, the familiar essayist makes the gossamer of his whims and fancies perdurable as diamonds. The great egotists, in particular, such as Pepys, Casanova, Montaigne, Cellini,Rousseau, are generally conceded each to have immortalized himself and all his traits, especially his frailties: for each lounges into our libraries unreticently, proclaiming, in the words of Montaigne, "I expose myself entire"; and each too has, by lending to every peccadillo permanency, kept letters healthily lewd, with the lustiness of eternal youth....

Well! that, with just one reservation, which I thought not unimportant, seemed true enough. For the great egotists do achieve very charming and tolerably permanent results, in a fashion that I could best appraise, I believed, by pausing here to consider the triumphant outcome, in our own era, of the literary endeavors of Mr. George Moore.

§ 81

No reasonably conceited author, I said,—if for the moment one might imagine any of the tribe to merit the adverb,—would aspire to be perpetuated in a form more worthy than, in the Carra Edition, had lately been bestowed upon the Collected Works of George Moore. It was true that I spoke with, of the promised twenty volumes, only fourteen at hand: but these I had found in every nicety of book-making to be wholly admirable. Paper and binding and printing were of the sort describable as luxurious.The frontispieces most handsomely presented George Moore in every imaginable phase of moustache and mental abstraction. In fine, it was the sort of Collected Edition which any victim of the ennervating habit of writing books could not but view a little wistfully. And, though for a while I had thought to lay finger upon one marked, consolatory defect,—that the lack of running-heads to the pages creates some difficulty in locating at once the especial subdivision of the volume for which you happen to be looking,—yet reflection had made against such petty fault-finding, by revealing that, after all, it was as remunerative to read in one place as another, in this longish book which is devoted, after all, entirely to one topic.

For Mr. Moore, of course, had nowhere written except incidentally about anything except George Moore. To some this might appear a dubious axiom, in view of the circumstance that of these fourteen volumes no less than eight consisted of the earlier Realistic Novels,—as we used to hear them called, only yesterday, with a certain lowering of the voice,—wherein there is no explicit word as to George Moore. Yet, when seen in the entirety of the Carra Edition, I thought,—as I still think,—and when appraised as component parts of the one longish book which every sincere literary artist perforce composes, and of which his various publications areeach a chapter, then these novels fall into their proper niche. George Moore in youth was exposed to, among other perils, the corrupting influence of "realism"; and here are some of the results, directly valuable to letters, in chief, as the record of a phase through which passed, long ago, George Moore. These books, to-day, rank somewhat with the extracts which Balzac gives you from the writings of his auctorial protagonists,—of Lucien de Rubempré, of Lousteau, of Canalis,—and which Balzac very sensibly presents not as literatureper se, but as useful lights upon their partly taken from life and partly imagined author. So here, in depicting George Moore, does the compiler of the Carra Edition appear to illumine his subject with copious extracts from the novels of his hero, who, again, is partly taken from life.

§ 82

I must at outset confess that I find these novels are quaint reading now. They seem faded, and somewhat pathetically droll, and they a bit too aptly illustrate their writer's petted wordsuranné, the while that young George Moore toils conscientiously at a ruthless exposition of the race-track, or a depiction of the evils of drink, or is daringly describing the temptations of stage life. Yes; it really is rather quaint as long as George Moore is playingup to his then current Vizetellean advertisements, and turning out "studies of degradation mercilessly done," or is endeavoring to convince the unwary that "you are in a moral dissecting room, watching the demonstration of a brilliant psychological surgeon." But the first moment he spies a chance to let his characters, at some breathing-spell between their disasters and their fornications, fall into talk about academic or æsthetic matters which interest George Moore, then the style quickens and fancy gallops. And the puppets discourse for pages upon pages the heresies and petulancies and "studied disrespects" of George Moore, and all advances briskly, undrugged by any narcotizing "drops of story." By and by, to be sure, the ghost of Germinie Lacerteux or of Bel-Ami (though the Carra Edition tactfully omitsMike Fletcher) arises to coerce the apostle of candor—the whole-hearted devotee of candor, even then,—with its gibbers about realism. But in a while the young puppet-master is again playing truant from his art's imagined responsibilities, and is contentedly expounding the notions of George Moore.

So one must not take these realistic novels over-seriously. That sort of realism—the realism of "the human document" and the selected "corner of creation," here to re-echo that far time's old-fangled catchwords,—was, as they said, the "trend" of that era. And even to-day, with the innate conservatismof youth, still do the immature laboriously transcribe the insignificant, in their exposures of the inadequacy of American standards and the loneliness of the budding artist in one or another parish of Philistia. These "trends" we, willy-nilly, must put up with....

§ 83

Of course, there is not, and never has been, in any important sense, any trend in literature. One says, in any important sense, because of the so amply attested fact that the only books which ultimately count, for their permitted season, are adequate expressions, not of any ideas just then in the air (to employ that delightfully two-edged phrase), but of the individual being who wrote that particular book. And personality seems a remarkably haphazard affair. You are born, for one inexplicable reason or another, as such and such a person, as a person endowed with private and especial faults and hallucinations. And if your book is ultimately to count, however transiently, you will in your book have managed to expose that person, very much as Mr. Moore came in the end to do, without talking or thinking any nonsense about "trends." You will have contrived, in fine, your own particular "method": and in contriving it you will do well to remember that, just as I pointed out at the beginning, there mustalways be, to the last digit, precisely as many "methods" as there are novelists.

Meanwhile, to be sure, the popular styles in books for the intelligentsia must always be varying, somewhat as every season the styles a little alter in disbeliefs and neckwear, and give room to some other method of irritating the conventional. And all really competent manufacturers of reading-matter, whether as publishers or authors, must always stay upon the alert to cater to the latest hebetude of serious-minded persons sufficiently cultured to assume that whatever they cannot quite understand or read with reasonable pleasure is probably high art. But the philosopher recalls that, somewhat to emend the proverb, every vogue has its day; and that, also, all literary modes must pass, pass very often with a hullabaloo, but always with rapidity.

It seems, in fact, only yesterday that both the books and the decolleté "sport shirt" of Blasco Ibáñez were the height of fashion, andThe Young Visiterswas a perdurable production. And now, in really literary circles, they tell me, the sublimities of M. Maeterlinck are no longer spoken of in lowered tones, but rather with raised eyebrows; Stevenson has become just a working model for writers upon the art of selling the short story; and even Mr. Kipling has passed into thegötterdämmerungof beingpraised by Mrs. Gerould.[9]Thus suddenly their fame is made a vain and doubtful good, and the shining gloss of all their glories is vaded, in the bright prime of such impeccant prosateurs as Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad and Marcel Proust: and it is salutary to reflect that Sir Rabindranath Tagore and O. Henry, they also, were once upon a time immortal for several months....

Well, and just so, in the departed youth of this George Moore, in the perverse Victorian 'eighties and 'nineties,—when, as Mr. Moore now puts it, "we were all cowed by the spell of realism, external realism,"—did many persons regard Zola and Flaubert and Maupassant and Huysmans with a seriousness which the considerate dare not wager that posterity will emulate, when it comes to appraising us and our own literary idols.

—All of which seems rather Mooreishly digressive. It would be perhaps a neater adhesion to the point succinctly to note here that, with the addition of some peculiarly delightful prefaces, the books which Vizetelly & Co. used to advertise as Mr. George Moore's Realistic Novels—listing them, one finds, with an invidious separateness from those of the firm's publications which, The Sheffield Independentwas wont to guarantee, "may be safely left lying about where the ladies of the family can pick them up and read them,"—have, in preparing these books for this Carra Edition, been rewritten throughout, alike with a view of stylistic improvement and of, as it is rather handsomely phrased, "returning from the conventions ofVanity FairandThe Small House at Allingtonto those that inspired the writing of Shakespeare's plays and the Bible." Mr. Moore, at last at ease in the exclusive company of one thousand subscribers only, can now speak freely without bothering about such finicking contemporaneous notions of delicacy and indelicacy as, we now learn, had until the printing of this Carra Edition somewhat hampered him. And for the rest, even in their most tedious passages of brilliant psychology, Mr. George Moore's Realistic Novels really do remain interesting, as relics.

Yet there perhaps I underrate these novels, which may be taken as interesting from quite other points of view. Mr. Moore is, for example, so convincingly the great prose artist everywhere in manner and gesture that we are rather generally apt to overlook his frequent omission to be anything of the sort in his writing....

§ 84

In fact I now recall that I once, regretfully, compiled my choice of the world's ten worst writers. Regretfully, I say, because I suspected that about every author in my list I was, in all likelihood, entirely wrong. For I found that, somehow, I had listed only such writers as possessed their recognized "cults" of perfervid admirers, and such writers as a respectable lapse of time had attested—perhaps—really to make some sort of mysterious appeal to a largish number of persons. One might of course, in private, assume that æsthetically these persons bemuse themselves with notions of their own superiority and refinement. Such anæsthetic notions still enable self-complacency to pull through many pages that are perused with rather less admiration of the author than of the reader,—although, for that matter, the majority of generally acknowledged and most permanent literary reputations would seem to be based upon some similar innocuous self-deceit.

Here, in any event, are the ten "established" authors endowed with "cults" whose masterpieces once appeared to me the most violently uninteresting and ill written: Jane Austen, George Borrow, Miguel de Cervantes, Henry James, Herman Melville, George Meredith, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Love Peacock, François Rabelais, and Walt Whitman.

I submitted this list without any comment save that I had made all suitable endeavors toward Melville since 1907: the antipathy was not new-born, among the bleated idiocies of his later ovine, or more robustiously arietin, admirers. And upon consideration, Peacock, I admitted, had not ever annoyed me with the relentless and deep tediousness of the others: and I for a moment inclined to strike out his name in disfavor of Marcel Proust or of James G. Huneker or of W.H. Hudson, who were at the time regarded vociferously; but refrained because that week's pother about any of these three might, after all, very well and speedily prove transient. The ten I named, though, seemed actually established in one or another sort of enduringness,—which was, to me, a fact that roused wonder not unmingled with regret. For there really must be something of enjoyment deep-hidden in the writings of these appalling persons. And, naturally, one dislikes to miss it.

§ 85

I repeat all this because to-day, upon reflection, and upon the strength of these Realistic Novels, I somewhat incline to substitute for the name of Thomas Love Peacock the name George Moore. The reputations of Mr. Moore and of Ananias, in fact, as masters of fictitious narrative, stand highabove almost equally slender pediments; with no proof anywhere existent that Ananias even attempted the difficult art wherein Mr. Moore has certainly never succeeded.

I am now about to speak with all possible moderation. For I very cordially admire the talent of Mr. Moore. That is one of the reasons why I must regret its occultation in these Realistic Novels.

It is not merely that these novels adhere to the naïve and now senescent device of assuming for the author omniscience. These stories have, that is, no stable point of view: the thoughts and the emotions of each character are divulged just as these come into being; and you are thus kept skipping, with all the agility and considerably more than the penetration of the well-named genuspulex irritans, from the inside of one imagined mind to the interior of another. That convention, I know, is old, it is, in fact, decrepit; but it is also childish: prose fiction really has advanced beyond such puerilities, except of course in its more popular variants and in the prevailing balderdash of the imperishable classics of prose fiction: and this convention, for me at least, destroys everywhere the illusion which I would willingly foster, destroying it for the reason that I can imagine no existence wherein I would know, even partially, what everybody was thinking and feeling.

Nor is it merely that these thin-blooded novelsare broken out with a rash of descriptory passages. I confess that, for one, the utmost I can do is to put up with the writer who formally and impersonally sets out to describe anything. When I am in my more amiable moods, then hurrying eyes glide by the solid stolid-looking paragraphs; I incuriously accept on faith the probability that the description is being competently attended to: and I, unvexed, pass on toward such portions of the book as may conceivably prove remunerative reading.... But far oftener am I the prey of logic and of peevishness, when I consider the malversation of time involved in every attempt to convey the true efficacy of a regarded vista, or of any observed object, by recording seriatim such attributes as, in life, we note simultaneously with plural senses. The discrepancy is the really considerable difference between a row of canned vegetable tins, howsoever painstakingly labeled, and a vegetable soup. And Lessing did so long ago dispose of the whole topic, among so many allied topics, that one would whole-heartedly like to see the passing of an examination upon theLaokoönmade preliminary to the securing of a license to write prose.... No: here again, I must protest, the conscientious novelist will assume a conscious point of view. The utmost he will permit himself in the way of description is to note that which would be noted, naturally, from that point of view at thatespecial moment. And all description will thus be converted into action, in the form, not necessarily stated outright, that so-and-so observed such-and-such phenomena. For I must here point out some obvious, if disregarded, truisms: that no scene or object can display any qualities unless there is some one to notice them; that, even then, these qualities stay undisplayed unless the potential observer have the needful interest and the time, just then, to notice them; and that to present these qualities as existing impersonally—howsoever general in "writing" may be this insane practise,—is to present (here again) an existence which is inconceivable.

But, passing over these grave common imbecilities, it does seem to be somebody's duty to protest against the equally grave and common delusion that Mr. Moore, even in these Realistic Novels, is "a master of English prose." The assertion is as a rule advanced, I suspect, by ordinarily well-balanced persons who have just seen or heard Mr. Joseph Conrad described as "a master of English prose," and have not utterly recovered: the prose of Mr. Moore, in any event,—not here, but in his embellished romancing about himself,—one may very often grant to be adequate. Yet Mr. Moore's vocabulary is far from adequate, for anyone who seeks distinction in an art of which the masters are omniverbarious. Here, too, variety appears a grace unthought-of; andhis employment (in these Realistic Novels) of the ready-made, time-battered phrase amounts—where his clichés do not, indeed, effuse a perturbing aspect of feeble-mindedness,—to mere wallowing in the slovenly.

I am still speaking with all possible moderation, as to a man whose writing, in his major performances, I admire. And yet I fear that what I have just said may sound overstated.... Well, I open the revised and final version ofA Mummer's Wife, as it chances, at page 220; and Mr. Moore there tells me, "A word sufficed to set the whole gang recounting experiences and comparing notes." I turn to page 229, and, still avoiding dialogue, I find Mr. Moore in the rôle of narrator averring, "At the end of the act she received an ovation." Hastily I proceed to page 236, where Mr. Moore philosophises,—"As is generally the case, there was right upon both sides." Even then do I afford him another chance; I go on to the next chapter, which, upon page 245, I discover to begin, "It never rains but it pours." And thereupon I close the book: for really nobody, no matter how widely he be acclaimed a master of vigorous and delightful prose, is privileged to talk with me in just that flat and meagre tone.... If, for the rest, you have an hour to waste, not quite unedifyingly, you might compare almost any one of the earlier versions of Mr. Moore's more ambitiouspassages with its replacer in the Carra Edition, and marvel over his faith in the stylistic thaumaturgy wrought by interjecting the word "and." And so will it become apparent to you that the haven of the artist's dream and the unfalteringly sought ideal of "revising" is not utterly inaccessible, and can be won to by and by, through steadily adhering to this bland and magic monosyllable, and by employing it to link each sentence in the book with the sentence which precedes it and with the sentence which follows it, and so to connect all the sentences into one single and sliding and ever slipping forward sentence, and languidly to model all upon the tentative and wavering progression of a long and thin and frail and flesh-tinted angle-worm....

But at this point I desist from tapping at the typewriter keys; and I re-read what I have just said in—upon the whole—depreciation of Mr. Moore. And every word of it seems to me quite true. Yet it lacks that fine frank ring of amateurishness without which literary dicta are as nothing; and I appear somehow to have lapsed into the professional accent of the luckless being who makes a business of reviewing books. Now, this accent I can only describe as that of one speaking from an eminence, which it is not at all necessary to have attained. It is the accent which implies that you may by and by, should other more important interests permit, takea Saturday afternoon off, and write a literary masterpiece of the same genre in which the discussed writer has, you benignantly allow, done his poor best during the last year or so. It is the accent with which the eunuch advocates birth control, strongly every month in The Dial, and weekly in The New York Times Book Review.[10]It is, in fine, an unlovable accent.

So I lament this accent, even in the moment that I protest it voices here—rather sniffishly, if you will,—the truth. I have endeavored to speak, I repeat, with all possible moderation. But that accent very certainly has crept in,—perhaps because I am here dealing with "realism," perhaps because of some occult underlying envy of these books' handsome physical appearance. It may be I am thinking the Biography ought to be issued thus, instead of George Moore's novels. I am sure I do not know....

In any event, I reflect that Balzac, also, does not always, nor indeed as a rule, ascribe to his auctorial heroes the gift of writing especially well; that the samples which Balzac, also, presents from the novels of an imaginary author do not pretend to be fine literature; and that Mr. Moore, in preparing this Carra Edition, had thus the shield of weighty precedent....

§ 86

The going, even so, is immeasurably better when we come, as now, to the consistently important books, toThe Confessions of a Young Man,Avowals,Memoirs of My Dead Life,Conversations in Ebury Street, and to theHail and Farewelltrilogy. For here Mr. Moore is candidly, and without any vain pretence of ascribing real weightiness to anything else, expressing his own nervous reactions to painting and books and to the best examples of human thought and anatomy, and here he has turned most potently to ensnaring us with "nets woven of curious stuffs,—of a singer's corset-lace, a forgotten dream, a strand of honey-colored hair, a phrase from Walter Pater, moonlight on a pillow in Orelay, a scrap from the Catechism translated by Verlaine, hopes, and aspirations, and, here and there, a faint and not too secret shame."

Now, it is in these books, to my finding, that Mr. Moore has made perhaps his only but his ineffably interesting addition to creative literature; and has caused to move like a corporeal, breathing being of flesh and blood his one great character, George Moore. How lavishly that character repays attention by the parodist was shown but yesterday when, inHeavens—that most trenchant of volumes from which I have just quoted,—Mr. Louis Untermeyerwrote what is, actually, the very best and loveliest appreciation of George Moore yet given us by anybody outside the pages of Mr. Moore. Then, too, there is the Beerbohm parody, not anything like so good, of course, but still containing its really superb sentence,—"There are moments when one does not think of girls, are there not, dear reader?" This is the sentence which George Moore has not ever, quite, dictated to his secretary: but for some years now he has fluttered close to its perfection....

Yes, certainly, the character does lend itself to caricature. Yet I shall not here speak of the rôle's component oddities, nor prattle any word about the Nouvelle Athènes or the Celtic Renaissance. Nobody dare attempt in one chapter to sum up George Moore after seeing a fine artist give over a lifetime to the task. So I can but refer you to the Carra Edition, as to a longish book which is devoted entirely to this topic, with the rider that I have found nowhere volumes more engaging than are the best of these.

One's human taste for the irrelevant provokes, of course, some natural speculation as to how little of this perverse, painstaking, fleering and inconsequential personality is based upon truth? What parsimonies in veracity, how much of self-denial, in short, has Mr. Moore at odd times woven into his scandal-mongering about George Moore? I grantthat, from the reader's selfish standpoint, it does not matter; and that our general pleasure in the performance ought not to be dashed by anybody's lugging in the refrain of Edgar Allan Poe's most famous poem. For Casanova also, you will recall, indulged in the same sort of romancing; and secured his most admirable effects through mixing in some revelatory fiction with etymologically pure truth. Nor did Cellini write under affidavit.... Then too, to me, the George Moore of the Carra Edition suggests—with, to be sure, a difference,—that Thackeray who is really the main character of Thackeray's Collected Works, the Thackeray who is always interrupting his puppets, to edify you with the unaffected confidences of the author, as a shrewd and tolerant and tender-hearted man of the great world who, as we now know, existed nowhere outside these books. Just so, one tacitly assumes, Mr. Moore has given us George Moore as he, not wholly spurred by either moral or æsthetic criteria, would like to be: and, for one, I find—upon the whole, and if it a bit matters,—both his aspiration and his artistry to be commendable. In that unending literary shadow-show wherein "all passes except Shakespeare and the Bible," George Moore should stay for a long while one of the great characters of English fiction: and in creating him, Mr. Moore has rendered everybodya considerable service at the price of condemning himself to eternal oblivion.

For these egotists who write perpetually about themselves are under no bond, and under no temptation whatever, to write the truth. So do we come to the reservation which I said just now I thought not unimportant: it is that in pretending to commemorate himself the self-respecting artist, who is also an egoist, substitutes an edited and a considerably embellished effigy. He immortalizes, in fine, somebody else.

And it is indeed to-day a fairly open secret that Mr. Moore in very little resembles the George Moore of the confessional romances. All persons who have known Mr. Moore in the flesh seem here unanimous: and in particular do those who have known in the flesh this historian of his own so many fleshly loves acclaim in him a beguiling tendency to rival the eremite St. Anthony in continence and imagination. "Some men kiss and do not tell,"—thus Lady Gregory has phrased it, with perfection:—"George Moore does not kiss; but he tells." Yet the point is that he "tells" very charmingly; and that therefore, beyond any possible doubt, posterity will rejoicingly accept George Moore, and, with admirable good sense, forget all about Mr. Moore.

So Mr. Moore has not hired perpetuity for himself,but has prolonged the existence of quite another person, through, no doubt, actual philanthropy....

Nor can I think of any conceivable reason why any author, whether he be called Moore or Thackeray or Casanova,—and no matter what be his notorious repute as an egoist where other writers have with lower cunning concealed their similarity to him,—should be at pains to immortalize himself. In fact, an egoist thinks too much of himself ever to let the truth get out. And no one who has encountered and conversed with authors, whether of marked or moderate ability, can fail to note what superior persons and how much more desirable associates they are in their books.... Nor, of course, does that alter the truth I voiced just now: your book, if it is to count, must express your personality: but most assuredly not all of it naked. Rather, should your book suggest what you would like to make of that personality when shaved, and bathed, and becomingly clothed, and judiciously inspirited with alcohol, before going out to be, to the reach of one's ability, agreeable company.

Besides, the literary artist, I must here repeat, labors primarily to divert himself. A man can get many emotions from contemplating a quite candid portrait of the person he finds in his own mind and in the bathtub, but pleasure, I suspect, is not one of them. So when the artist takes as his ostensibletheme himself, he must take too the liberty to adorn that theme with such variations as may happen to strike his fancy. Otherwise, his art might very well fail in its main purpose, which—need I say again?—is to divert the artist.

§ 87

And I shall here claim the advantage of my own rulings, I shall here divert myself by turning candidly to egotism, without any beatings about the bush in search of even one fig-leaf.... I have, then, always aimed to give my writings some quality of permanence: but I am in smug accord with all the more unsympathetic of my critics in detecting in no one of my now numerous volumes any tendency to immortalize me. That is a fault of which the Biography, I rejoicingly protest, is innocent.

It would, for one matter, be unendurable to find myself portrayed in books which I so often am forced to read in the already depressing enough pursuit of misprints and blunders. For no man—as Molière and Isaiah and William Dean Howells have all not improbably observed, at some time or another,—cares quite to face the truth about himself. Looking back upon my own past, I find it undiversified, under howsoever many dappling clouds of legend, by any very striking crimes: but there ismuch of what to the first glance seems shirking and equivocation, so much of petty treacheries, of small lies, and of responsibilities evaded, that I am whole-heartedly glad to reflect my private observatory is not, and never will be, open to the public. Item by item, I can explain away each one of the disfiguring features; I can prove, in my half-magnanimous and half-aggrieved meditations, that in no one of these affairs was I really to blame; and I can utterly extenuate myself from all fault and wrong-doing. I do, very often. But, at bottom,—even so,—somewhere,—lurks as if clouded with much ink the cuttlefish suspicion that I may not after all be endowed with the wholly blameless and, indeed, heroic character which mere logic assures me I possess. I have the notion, too, that many of my most near associates would agree with the suspicion rather than the logic.

And when I talk about my own doings or my personal sentiments, I momentarily detect myself in heightening, softening, or overcoloring the reality, as if in an instinctive effort to conform with what my hearer will, conceivably, expect and approve. Certainly not much of me gets into my conversation.... In writing, I do wax, as one might phrase it, bolder. This is largely fruit of my knowledge that to the persons among whom my physical existence is passed, my writing means nothing, or at most isvisited now and then by an unardent glance, as a highly problematic source of income: the persons about whom alone I really care will never read whatever I may elect to publish, nor ever, if by some unforeseeable circumstances compelled to do so, could they take my nonsense seriously. I am thus at liberty to write, without incurring any discomforts of actual weight, whatever I may prefer. I am nowadays even sure of getting it printed. Yet when I reflect how little I find, in so much writing, of any candid and fair expression of that person whom I with real regret accept as myself,—in my own thoughts' very privately issued version, with so many unopened leaves and with such handsome margins of error,—why, then, I am somewhat astonished and vastly pleased.... I marvel at, for one thing, the maniacal zeal with which I have transferred the credit for almost every line I have written, to this or the other invented "authority" or narrator. I seem from the first thus to have hidden myself as if instinctively. And moreover, in the few nooks thus unprotected, I find I have, throughout the whole Biography, enacted one who is rather wiser and more amiable, and rather more clever and more sophisticatedly broad-minded and more freakish, than I can on any terms believe myself.... No: I am not intimate with the author of the Biography: and now and then I suspect a certain condescension inhis manner, even toward me, because of my persistency in working for him so hard.

And all these small deceits are benefactions for everybody concerned. But the point is that every person whom egoism reduces to writing, must aspire to, and the more adroit do truly succeed in, just this laborious form of suicide and self-interment, under the effigy they find diverting.

FOOTNOTES:[9]Katherine Fullerton Gerould, a writer of the day, and the author of many stories so exactly in the best manner of Henry James that they well might actually have been written during the latter years of his life by Mrs. Edith Wharton.[10]Periodicals of the day, which occasionally published articles dealing with literary matters.

[9]Katherine Fullerton Gerould, a writer of the day, and the author of many stories so exactly in the best manner of Henry James that they well might actually have been written during the latter years of his life by Mrs. Edith Wharton.

[10]Periodicals of the day, which occasionally published articles dealing with literary matters.

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