Comes the question of the effect of psychoanalytic criticism upon our judgment of living authors. Writers like George Moore, of the living, and Strindberg, of the recently dead, have not waited for posterity to make discoveries about their love affairs. They told us about them frankly in their autobiographical works. Other writers, great poets like Yeats and Symons, have sung of their loves more or less openly in their lyrics. When posterity reads the biographies of these last two poets, that will no doubt some day be written, it will, I believe, learn that the emotions these poets expressed in their work had a real basis. But we have no right to probe into an author's private life while he is alive; we may make detailed deductions from his work, but we should not give them publicity. The reader who finds the early Kipling cynical about women, who notes Hardy constantly reiterating the tragedies caused by love, may venture to guess there must be some reason for this, but it would be a vicious criticism that made this topic the subject of an article while these men are alive. One who reads Wells' _New Machiavelli_ or Dreiser's _The Genius_ and observes the author's preoccupation with the marriage problem, may also draw his own conclusions about how much the fiction is inspired by reality, but it is a fitter subject for posterity to take up. Occasionally an author like Robert Herrick or Upton Sinclair has his domestic affairs dragged into the limelight, on account of the sensational interest of our newspapers, and the reader learns that novels like _One Woman's Life_ and _Love's Pilgrimage_ were somewhat autobiographical. There has been a great tendency in our day on the part of authors to write autobiographical novels. We should not deprecate this tendency. When I think that Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert and Zola, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky and Turgenev, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, George Meredith and Henry James were often autobiographical, I realise that all literary men, novelists as well as poets, are compelled to wear their hearts on their sleeves by virtue of their art. That criticism which reproached Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Senancour and De Musset for having been occupied too much with themselves is unfair. With whom else would the critics have the authors occupied? A man cannot get out of himself. When he undertakes to write a book, he tells us practically beforehand that he is going to talk about himself. Therefore, such excellent novels of our time as Jack London's _Martin Eden_, Stephen French Whitman's _Predestined_, Maugham's _Of Human Bondage_ and Beresford's _Invisible Event_ are to be commended. Should these authors' renown live, posterity will learn that some of the emotional life lived by the characters had been experienced by the authors themselves. It is, however, not a matter of importance whether the mere incidents recorded in these novels actually transpired in the authors' lives.