We were saying, when sidetracked by the necessity of explaining the universe, that the self-revelation which writing a book entails is in most cases depressing, but not by any means always so. Boswell was not much of a man judged by the standards of his own day or ours, either one, yet Boswell knew himself better than he knew Dr. Johnson by the time he had finished his life of the Doctor. It must have bucked him up immensely to know that he was at least big enough himself to measure a bigger man up and down, in and out, criss-cross and sideways, setting down the complicated result without any error that the human intelligence can detect. It must have appeased the ironical soul of Henry Adams to realise that he was one of the very few men who had never fooled himself about himself, and that evidence of his phenomenal achievement in the shape of the book _The Education of Henry Adams_, would survive him after his death--or at least, after the difficulties of communicating with those on earth had noticeably increased (we make this wise modification lest someone match Sir Oliver Lodge’s _Raymond, or Life After Death_ with a volume called _Henry, or Re-Education After Death_). It must have sent a thrill of pleasure through the by no means insensitive frame of Joseph Conrad when he discovered, on completing _Nostromo_, that he had a profounder insight into the economic bases of modern social and political affairs than nine-tenths of the professional economists and sociologists--plus a knowledge of the human heart that they have never dreamed worth while. For Conrad saw clearly, and so saw simply; the “silver of the mine” of this, his greatest story, was, it is true, an incorruptible metal, but it could and did alter the corruptible nature of man--and would continue to do so through generation after generation long after his Mediterranean sailor-hero had become dust. Even in the case of the humble and unknown writer whose completed manuscript, after many tedious journeys, comes home to him at last, to be re-read regretfully but with an undying belief not so much in the work itself as in what it was meant to express and so evidently failed to--even in his case the great consolation is the attestation of a creed. Very bad men have died, as does the artist in Shaw’s _The Doctor’s Dilemma_, voicing with clarity and beauty the belief in which they think they have lived or ought to have lived; but a piece of work is always an actual living of some part of the creed that is in you. It may be a failure but it has, with all its faults, a gallant quality, the quality of the deed done, which men have always admired, and because of which they have invented those things we call words to embody their praise.