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."

_9._

_A Theme With Variations_

§ 80

The literary 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 are each 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

literature _per 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 word _suranné_, 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 playing up 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 omits _Mike 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 conservatism of 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 must always 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, and _The

Young Visiters_ was 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 the

_götterdämmerung_ of being praised 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 Independent was

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 of _Vanity Fair_ and

_The Small House at Allington_ to 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 high above 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 genus _pulex 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 novels are 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 the _Laokoön_ made 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

that especial 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;

and his 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 of _A 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 ambitious passages

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, take a 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, to _The Confessions of a Young Man_,

_Avowals_, _Memoirs of My Dead Life_, _Conversations in

Ebury Street_, and to the _Hail and Farewell_ trilogy. 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, in _Heavens_--that most trenchant of volumes

from which I have just quoted,--Mr. Louis Untermeyer wrote 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 grant

that, 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 everybody a 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 ostensible theme 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

is much 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 is visited 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 in his 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.