Besides, the literary artist, I must here repeat, labors primarily to divert himself. A man can get many emotions from contemplating a quite candid portrait of the person he finds in his own mind and in the bathtub, but pleasure, I suspect, is not one of them. So when the artist takes as his ostensible theme himself, he must take too the liberty to adorn that theme with such variations as may happen to strike his fancy. Otherwise, his art might very well fail in its main purpose, which--need I say again?--is to divert the artist. § 87 And I shall here claim the advantage of my own rulings, I shall here divert myself by turning candidly to egotism, without any beatings about the bush in search of even one fig-leaf.... I have, then, always aimed to give my writings some quality of permanence: but I am in smug accord with all the more unsympathetic of my critics in detecting in no one of my now numerous volumes any tendency to immortalize me. That is a fault of which the Biography, I rejoicingly protest, is innocent. It would, for one matter, be unendurable to find myself portrayed in books which I so often am forced to read in the already depressing enough pursuit of misprints and blunders. For no man--as Molière and Isaiah and William Dean Howells have all not improbably observed, at some time or another,--cares quite to face the truth about himself. Looking back upon my own past, I find it undiversified, under howsoever many dappling clouds of legend, by any very striking crimes: but there is much of what to the first glance seems shirking and equivocation, so much of petty treacheries, of small lies, and of responsibilities evaded, that I am whole-heartedly glad to reflect my private observatory is not, and never will be, open to the public. Item by item, I can explain away each one of the disfiguring features; I can prove, in my half-magnanimous and half-aggrieved meditations, that in no one of these affairs was I really to blame; and I can utterly extenuate myself from all fault and wrong-doing. I do, very often. But, at bottom,--even so,--somewhere,--lurks as if clouded with much ink the cuttlefish suspicion that I may not after all be endowed with the wholly blameless and, indeed, heroic character which mere logic assures me I possess. I have the notion, too, that many of my most near associates would agree with the suspicion rather than the logic.