The Making Of A Novelist

Every man who writes about himself is, on the face of the matter, obnoxious to the suspicion which haunts the daily pathway of the Bore. To talk of self and not be offensive demands an art which is not always given to man. And yet we are always longing to get near each other and to understand each other; and in default of a closer communion with our living fellows we take to our bosoms the shadows of fiction and the stage. If the real man could be presented to us by any writer of his own history we should all hail him with enthusiasm. Pepys, of course, came nearer than anybody else; but this is only because he wrote for his own reading and meant to keep himself a secret. Dickens exquisitely veils and unveils his own personality and career in Copperfield, and scores of smaller writers have done the same thing in fiction to our great pleasure. But to set down boldly, openly, and as a fact for general publication the things of one's own doing, saying, and thinking is an impertinence whose only.