Project Gutenberg's The Making Of A Novelist, by David Christie Murray

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Title: The Making Of A Novelist
An Experiment In Autobiography

Author: David Christie Murray

Release Date: August 1, 2007 [EBook #22204]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST ***

Produced by David Widger

THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST

An Experiment In Autobiography

By David Christie Murray

CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1894

[Portrait]
From a Photograph by Thomas Fall

TO J. M. BARRIE

PREFACE

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 justification can be found in the
public approval. If Pepys had written his Diary for publication he would
have been left to oblivion as a driveller. But we surprise the man's
secret, we see what he never meant to show us, the peering jackdaw
instinct is satisfied; and we feel, besides, a certain sense of humorous
pity and affectionate disdain which the man himself, had we known him in
life as we know him in his book, could never have excited. Rousseau, to
me, is flatly intolerable, because he meant to tell the world what every
man should have the decency to hide.

The perfect autobiog