is the
better for seeing is not how life might conceivably be handled, but how it
actually has been handled, freshly and distinctly, by someone in a
commonplace milieu. Life isn't a bit romantic, but it is devilish
interesting. It doesn't go as you want it to go. Sometimes it lags,
sometimes it dances; and horrible things happen, often most unexpectedly.
In the novel, everything has to be rounded off and led up to, and you never
get a notion of the inconsequence of life. The interest of life is not what
happens, but how it affects people, how they meet it, how they fly from it:
the relief of a biography is that you haven't got to invent your setting
and your character--all that is done for you: you have just got to select
the characteristic things, and not to blur the things that you would have
wished otherwise. For God's sake, let us get at the truth in books, and not
use them as screens to keep the fire off, or as things to distract one from
the depressing facts in one's bank-book. I welcome all this output of
novels, because it at least shows that people are interested in life, and
trying to shape it. But I don't want romance, and I don't want ugly and
sensational realism either. That is only romance in another shape. I want
real men and women--not from an autobiographical point of view, because
that is generally romantic too--but from the point of view of the friends
to whom they showed themselves frankly and naturally, and without that
infernal reticence which is not either reverence or chivalry, but simply an
inability to face the truth,--which is the direct influence of the spirit
of evil. If one of my young men turns out a good biography of an
interesting person, however ineffective he was, I shall not have lived in
vain. For, mind this--very few people's performances are worth remembering,
while very many people's personalities are."

LIX

OF EXCLUSIVENESS

Rose told a story one night which amused Father Payne immensely. He had
been up in town, and had sate next a Minister's wife, who had been very
confidential. She had said to Rose that her husband had just been elected
into a small dining-club well known in London, where the numbers were very
limited, the society very choice, and where a single negative vote excluded
a candidate. "I don't think," said the good lady, "that my husband has ever
been so pleased at anything that has befallen him, not even when he was
first given office--such a distinguishe