The severe strictures passed by George Eliot upon autobiographies are directed against scandal-mongering no less than against personal outpourings. She could have had the English-speaking world for a confidant had she consented to confide to it; but nothing was less to her liking. She objected to “volunteered and picked confessions,” as in their nature insincere, and also as conveying, directly or indirectly, accusations against others. Her natural impulse was to veil her own soul--which was often sick and sore--from scrutiny; and, being a person of limited sympathies, she begrudged her neighbour the privilege of exhibiting his soul, sores and all, to the public. The struggle of human nature “to bury its lowest faculties,” over which she cast unbroken silence, is what the egotist wants to reveal, and the public wants to observe. When Nietzsche says debonairly of himself, “I have had no experience of religious difficulties, and have never known what it was to feel sinful,” the statement, though probably untrue, creates at once an atmosphere of flatness. It is what Walt Whitman ardently admired in beasts-- “They do not lie awake in the dark, and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.” Next to the pleasure of writing lovingly about ourselves--but not comparable to it--is the pleasure of writing unlovingly about our fellows. Next to the joy of the egotist is the joy of the detractor. I think that the last years of Saint-Simon, those sad impoverished years when he lived forgotten by his world, must have been tremendously cheered by the certainty that, sooner or later, the public would read his memoirs. Nobody knows with what patient labour, and from what devious sources he collected his material; but we can all divine the secret zest with which he penned his brilliant, malicious, sympathetic, truth-telling pages. Thirty years after his death some of these pages crept cautiously into print; but a full hundred years had passed before the whole text was given to the world. Perhaps the dying French gentleman anticipated no earlier resurrection for his buried manuscript; but he knew his nation and he knew his work. The nation and the work were bound to meet.