The lines of Pope that I have quoted elsewhere dwell truthfully enough upon life's endless playing,--upon the playing of the child with straws and rattles, of the young man with his mistresses, of the mature with wealth and worldly honors, and of the aged with rosaries and prayer-books. But the solace, the true virtue, of these playthings arises from the fiction that the player tells to himself about them. No child plays with a straw: he brandishes a sword that has just chopped off a dragon's head. The young man, exultant, terrified, touches and uncovers, not an expanse of epidermis and small hairs and sweat glands, but the body of a goddess. The banker is reveling in that romance about Strasburg, Virginia: and the aged clasp not a prayer-book but the key to eternal bliss. Everywhere, in fine, the creating romantic who lives in every human being is either composing or else borrowing the kind of romance which most potently diverts him, and prevents his going mad. § 15 Well, it is the privilege of the novelist--I mean, at last, the novelist who is frankly listed as such in Who's Who--to aid according to his abilities in this old world-wide effort, so to delude mankind that nobody from birth to death need ever really bother about his, upon the whole, unpromising situation in the flesh. It is the privilege of the novelist who happens also to be an artist, to blaze a trail upon which his readers may follow, and be delighted by the by-products of his hedonism. For it is his higher privilege to divert his own thoughts from unprofitable and rational worrying; and to lead such as may choose to follow him in one more desperate sortie from that ordered living and from the selves of which all men are tired. So I suspect there must always be, to the last digit, precisely as many "methods" as there are novelists. For the endeavor of the novelist, even by the lowest and most altruistic motives, is to tell untruths that will be diverting: and of their divertingness he needs, and in fact can have (prior to the receipt of royalty statements), no touchstone save only the response which these untruths evoke from him. His primary endeavor must therefore, upon merely rational and sordid grounds, be to divert, not any possible reader, but himself.