We cannot see another man’s personality in full rounded vision. We get peeps at him; broken lights and flickering shadows of his character dance before us. We chase the shadow, and think we can capture the man and rifle him of his every locked-up thought and uncover his soul’s nakedness. The popular writer analyzes, probes, dissects human character on paper, and we marvel at his subtlety in reading so far into people. He plucks the gay plumage off the poor bird he has trapped, and leaves the stripped and quivering body an unpleasant spectacle for the public to contemplate through the glass case of a six-shilling novel. The novelist is a crude, fumbling workman at his trade. His hand is too clumsy for his tools. He dissects his paper dolls as they pass before him in a paper world, but the tangled, unbalanced, erratic human being pulsing with mystic life, even his next-door neighbour, baffles him on the doorstep. The novelist is a cunning artist, but an unskilful philosopher. He works like Conan Doyle’s great detective Sherlock Holmes, who can unravel any mystery he himself concocts in the pages of the _Strand Magazine_, but is no use to Scotland Yard in tracking a real murderer or laying bare an elusive crime. If some famous men who in their day and generation lived in cheap houses and mixed with common people, and died unparagraphed in daily papers, could see themselves now, as we see them, promoted to illustrious companionship with the mighty dead, their heads would spin with amazement at themselves for having arrived in splendour; they would stagger at the worship paid them by reverent posterity. During life they were great artists in mufti. They were regarded as unimportant persons by their own contemporaries, and to-day they are posted amongst the demi-gods of history. They knew themselves to be good workmen who did a good day’s work for a fair day’s pay, and then, like other honest day-labourers, at nightfall, with clean consciences, they laid down their tools, and their life-story ended there. They little knew that they had the bud of immortality swelling in their veins, soon to break and flower into endless renown.