mountain. He will not begin, like Baudelaire in the cafe: "On the
night I killed my father...." He will more likely tell us, like Pepys,
how he beat the servant-girl with a broom, or how, like Horace, he
threw away his shield and ran from the battle. Pepys lives in
literature because he was unblushingly, unboastingly, frank about his
littleness--his jealousy of his wife, his petty conquests of other
women, his eternal sensualities mixed with his eternal prayers. How
vitally he portrays himself in a thousand sentences like: "I took
occasion to be angry with my wife before I rose about her putting up
half-a-crown of mine in a paper box, which she had forgotten where she
had lain it. But we were friends again, as we are always!" Between
that and the artistic attitude of naughtiness in a book like Mr
George Moore's _Memoirs of My Dead Life_, what a gulf there is! The
one is as fresh a piece of nature as a thorn-tree on a hill-side; the
other is as near life as the cloak-and-dagger plays of the theatre.
English prose literature has suffered immensely during the last
century because it has shrunk from the honesty of Mr Pepys and
attitudinised, now in the manner of Prince Albert, now in the manner
of Mr Moore. It has worn the white flower of a blameless life--or the
opposite--instead of the white sheet of repentance. It has suffered
from the obsession at one time of sex, at another time of sexlessness.
It has seldom, like modern Russian literature, been the confession of
a man's or a people's soul.

It is not only in literature, however, that the supreme genius is the
genius of confession. One demands the same kind of honest and personal
speech from one's friends. One cannot be friends with a man who is not
a man but an echo. The poets have sung of echo as a beautiful thing.
It may be well enough among the mountains, but who would live in a
world of echoes? One demands of one's friend that he shall be himself,
even though it involves a liking for the poems of Mr G. R. Sims,
rather than that he should be a boneless imitation who can talk the
current jargon about Picasso and the cubists. To confess that one has
no taste for the latest fad in the arts and philosophy is becoming a
rarer and rarer form of originality. We utter our pallid judgments in
terror at once of the clique of the moment and of posterity. We are
afraid that our contemporaries may tell us that we no longer can keep
abreast of _les jeunes_, but are become ossif