All literature consists of the written opinions and ideas, the knowledge and experience, of individuals; it is a chorus of human voices. Often the individuality of the creative artist is lost in the magnitude of the work. It is present, necessarily, in every line, but in the highest forms of literature, epic and dramatic poetry, the personal lineaments are dissolved. Shakespeare, sincerest of poets, did not in his dramas reveal his heart or directly utter a single belief that we can feel sure was the private conviction of the author, and the attempts to associate lines from Shakespeare with the personal experiences of the actor of Stratford are invariably grotesque. Homer, who, according to Mr. Kipling, “smote his bloomin’ lyre” and “winked back” at us, was no such living man; it is likely that even if there was a Homer, a poet who made the nucleus of “Iliad,” many hands during several centuries produced the Greek epics, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” as we have them. Although Dante writes in the first person, his adventures in worlds beyond the earth are those of a disembodied spirit, a universal soul seeing visions in regions where he must put off something of his personality before he can enter. In the places where his prejudices and local enmities creep into his immense epic of the heavens, his work is least poetic; it is precipitated from the ideal to a kind of ghostly guide book, and the voices of the angels and the winds of the under world for the moment become still. The novelist at his best disappears from his work. There is no greater shock than when at the end of “The Newcomes,” Thackeray abruptly wrenches us from the deathbed of Colonel Newcome and says that he, W. M. Thackeray, has just written a story and that it is now fading away into Fableland. A device of printing would save us from the shock; the epilogue ought to begin on a new page, and a large “Finis” should follow Colonel Newcome’s death. The person who makes a work of art has the privilege of talking about himself in a preface; after that he must stand back and let the stage fill with characters. Even in great art, however, we do feel the presence of a man and we are willing to let him step in front of his stage sometimes and talk in his own person. The best English novelists, Fielding, Thackeray, George Eliot, Meredith, are essayists for pages at a time, and most of us do not resent their intrusion. We like writers who use the capital I.