To ask that the autobiographer should “know himself as a realist, and deal with himself as an artist,” is one way of demanding perfection. Realists are plentiful, and their ranks are freshly recruited every year. Artists are rare, and grow always rarer in an age which lacks the freedom, the serenity, the sense of proportion, essential to their development. It has happened from time to time that a single powerful and sustained emotion has forced from a reticent nature an unreserved and illuminating disclosure. Newman’s “Apologia pro Vita sua” was written with an avowed purpose--to make clear the sincerity of his religious life, and to refute a charge of deceitfulness. The stern coercion which gave it birth, and which carried it to a triumphant close, was remote from any sense of enjoyment save such as might be found in clarity of thought and distinction of workmanship. The thrust of truth in this fragment of autobiography has carried it far; but it is not by truth alone that a book lives. It is not by simple veracity that minds “deeply moralized, discriminating and sad” have charmed, and will always charm, the few austere thinkers and fastidious critics whom a standardized world has spared. The pleasure derived by ordinary readers from memoirs and reminiscences is twofold. It is the pleasure of acquiring agreeable information in an agreeable way, and it is, more rarely, the pleasure of a direct and penetrating mental stimulus. “The Education of Henry Adams” has so filtered through the intelligent public mind that echoes of it are still to be heard in serious lectures and flippant after-dinner speeches. We can, if we are adroit borrowers, set up intellectual shop-keeping on Mr. Adams’s stock-in-trade. We can deal out over our own counters his essentially marketable wares.