ogres, 'Le Petit Poucet' et 'La Belle au Bois dormant.'

People are wont to attribute this sort of thing to the vanity and jealousy of authors. But that explanation is too cheap. It is really part and parcel of the selfabsorption which is a condition precedent of self-reproduction in literature. Disbelief in others, tending to a positive dislike of them, seems to be complementary to that self-confidence, not to say self-admiration, without which you cannot have triumphant self-expression. The common talk about "the modesty of true genius" is mere cant. In Alfred de Vigny's correspondence there is a typical revelation of the author's real need. It is in the last line of his last letter, written just before his death: "You talk a good deal about belief and believers. Believe in me, with a firm faith." Vigny passed for a singularly modest man, reserved, sensitive, shut up in his tour d'ivoire; but here he lays bare the pride at his heart, and at the heart of every creative writer. You are to believe in him-as he believes in himself—it is a necessity of his being. And read those wonderful letters of Balzac's, already cited. He says, "Père Goriot" is "grandiose." Again, "Si le "Lys dans La Vallée' n'est pas un bréviaire femelle, je ne suis rien. La vertu y est sublime et point ennuyeuse." Also, another of his own books is a "delicious composition."

To call this vanity is absurd.

of power.

It is the consciousness Authors are not always so frank in admit

ting it, they are afraid of ridicule; but they have it, or

they would not be authors.

They would be solicitors, critics. Whatever form

or licensed victuallers or literature may take, it is, in essence, the revelation of a personality. This is as true of the "objective ” writers to use the old-fashioned terminology-as of the "subjective." If it stares us in the face in a lyric of Shelley's, it is no less to be found, by those who have eyes to see, in a novel of Scott's. As Keble said, "the story is interposed, as a kind of transparent veil, between the listener and the narrator's real drift and feelings. The history of Waverley, or Henry Morton, or Ivanhoe, is but a pretext for the author's employing himself on those scenes, and characters, and sentiments which would best satisfy the cravings of his own ruling fancy." And yet we rail at the author for his sensitiveness to criticism! As if his work were not as inevitable, unmodifiable a part of himself as the very nose on his face! If his work is to be worth anything, he must "put his heart into it," as we say. Clearly, then, in striking at his work we pierce his heart. We complain of his work as out of harmony with this or that general conBut the author feels that it answers to harmony, one of which we can know nothing, an inner harmony of his own; that it must be what it is; that it is a link in a long chain of cause and effect, hidden from us necessarily, hidden, too, probably from himself, but a chain which holds him captive. And we call him to account as though he were a free man ! Naturally he wails: what is the use of criticism ?

ception of ours.

a very different

Every step we take, every expression that flits across our features, every mood, the smallest trick of manner —these things make up ourselves, they are penalties or rewards which we cannot escape. Your criticism of them, be it favourable or unfavourable, is bound to be unjust, for it is not en connaissance de cause. To know me you must know my spiritual history, and how are you to know that which I do not know myself? Life is so obscure a thing as to make all criticism a monstrous impertinence. Of a thousand emotions only one may come to the surface; the chances are (remember the disparity between language and emotion) that one emotion does not get itself accurately expressed; even should it, by rare luck, achieve full expression, it may be an emotion that gives no sort of clue to the rest. If I write about Shakespeare and the musical glasses, at the back of my mind there may be something quite different, something of which I am not for the moment conscious, but which has directly caused my mood, all the same-the dull ache, it may be, of longing for an absent friend. An author's work is the outcome of millions of hidden causes like these. Hence the futility of criticism.

And here you have the last touch of irony: that criticism is as inevitable a piece of self-expression as the work criticised. We rail at the egoism, the selfabsorption, self-glorification of authors. As if critics, any more than authors, could get outside themselves! But criticism, it seems, there must be? Then let it

play the game fairly. Let the critic, as far as he can, make the self-revelation frank and complete. He cannot, any more than the author, tell us all about his inner harmony, his inmost secret self upon which his judgments are based; but he can at least give us a clue to it. The necessity for that constitutes the real condemnation of anonymous criticism. Anonymous criticism is a meaningless thing, a hieroglyph of which the key is withheld. Protests against it are generally raised in the interests of authors. But I would protest in the interests of criticism itself. It is a futility, as

I say, so far as the works criticised are concerned. "Things are what they are and their consequences are what they will be." But that is no reason why we should make it futile as an end in itself.

St. Augustine

His "Confessions.”—Even as the devout are accustomed to say, very justly, that there is no reason why the devil should have all the best tunes, so am I minded to say— I trust without impropriety--that there is no reason why the theologians should have all the best books. No doubt the main virtue of the "Confessions" of St. Augustine is one of spiritual edification. But they have a purely literary virtue, too, and a psychological virtue. They are a lifelike and candid picture of a man. They are a minute and curious study in self-analysis and self-revelation-a "document humain," as the cant phrase goes. Whatever may be said against egoism, the fascination of autobiography is not to be denied. No doubt "the Ego," as Pascal declared, "is hateful"; but Pascal had also to admit the pleasure experienced when, looking for an author in a book, you "find a man "" there. So long as the man keeps in touch with other men, enables us to see ourselves in him, we read him with delight. The permanent popularity of St. Augustine's "Confessions"