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.

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.