But what of the consequences of revealing yourself to others? Writing a novel will surely mean that you will incur them. We must speak of them briefly; and then we may get on to the thing for which you are doubtless waiting with terrible patience--the way to write the novel itself. Never fear! If you will but endure steadfastly you shall Know All. 12 “Certainly, publish everything,” commented the New York _Times_ editorially upon a proposal to give out earnings, or some other detail, of private businesses. “All privacy is scandalous,” added the newspaper. In this satirical utterance lies the ultimate justification for writing a novel. All privacy is scandalous. If you don’t believe it, read some of the prose of James Joyce. _A Portrait of The Artist As a Young Man_ will do for a starter. _Ulysses_ is a follow-up. H. G. Wells likes the first, while deploring so much sewerage in the open street. You see, nothing but a sincere conviction concerning the wickedness of leaving anything at all unmentioned in public could justify such narratives as Mr. Joyce’s. In a less repulsive sense, the scandal of privacy is what underlies any novel of what we generally call the “realistic” sort. Mr. Dreiser, for instance, thinks it scandalous that we should not know and publicly proclaim the true nature of such men as Hurstwood in his _Sister Carrie_. Mr. Hardy thinks it scandalous that the world should not publicly acknowledge the purity of Tess Durbeyfield and therefore he gives us a book in which she is, as the subtitle says, “faithfully presented.” Gene Stratton-Porter thinks it scandalous not to tell the truth about such a boy as Freckles. The much-experienced Mr. Tarkington, stirred to his marrow by what seems almost a world conspiracy to condone the insufferable conceit of the George Amberson Minafers among us, writes _The Magnificent Ambersons_ to make us confess how we hate ’em--and how our instinctive faith in them is vindicated at last. Every novelist who gains a public of any size or permanence deliberately, and even joyfully, faces the consequences of the revelation of himself to some thousands of his fellow-creatures. We don’t mean that he always delineates himself in the person of a character, or several characters, in his stories. He may do that, of course, but the self-exposure is generally much more merciless. The novelist can withhold from the character which, more or less, stands for himself his baser qualities. What he cannot withhold from the reader is his own mind’s limitations.