It is possible to maintain that “I” is a more modest pronoun than “one,” by which some writers seem to wish to displace it. If a man says “I think,” he speaks only for himself, while if he says “one thinks,” he insinuates that the opinion advanced is a general or normal view. To say “one does not like this picture,” is a more deadly attack upon it than to say “I do not like it.” It would seem also that more freedom of self-expression is appropriate to a book than to ordinary intercourse, because people are not obliged to read books, and the author has a right to assume that his readers are, in a general way, sympathetic with that phase of his personality that he is trying to express. If we do not sympathize why do we continue to read? We may, however, find fault with him if he departs from that which it is the proper function of the book to assert, and intrudes a weak and irrelevant “I” in which he has no reason to suppose us interested. I presume we can all think of books that might apparently be improved by going through them and striking out passages in which the author has incontinently expressed an aspect of himself that has no proper place in the work. In every higher kind of production a person needs to understand and believe in himself—the more thoroughly the better. It is precisely that in him which he feels to be worthy and at the same time peculiar—the characteristic—that it is his duty to produce, communicate, and realize; and he cannot possess this, cannot differentiate it, cleanse it from impurities, consolidate and organize it, except through prolonged and interested self-contemplation. Only this can enable him to free himself from the imitative on the one hand and the whimsical on the other, and to stand forth without shame or arrogance for what he truly is. Consequently every productive mind must have intense self-feeling; it must delight to contemplate the characteristic, to gloat over it if you please, and in this way learn to define, arrange, and express it. If one will take up a work of literary art like, say, the “Sentimental Journey,” he will see that a main source of the charm of it is in the writer’s assured and contented familiarity with himself. A man who writes like that has delighted to brood over his thoughts, jealously excluding everything not wholly congenial to him, and gradually working out an adequate expression. And the superiority, or at least the difference, in tone and manner of the earlier English literature as compared with that of the nineteenth century is apparently connected with a more assured and reposeful self-possession on the part of the older writers, made possible, no doubt, by a less urgent general life. The same fact of self-intensity goes with notable production in all sorts of literature, in every art, in statesmanship, philanthropy, religion; in all kinds of career.