ce among men of genius. His confession,
however, must be as honest as if vanity and pretence had never been
known. It is not enough that he should confess his vices. It may be
more fashionable at the time to confess one's vices than one's
virtues. When a confession is merely a form of boasting it becomes as
frivolous as Dr Cook's story of his discovery of the Pole. There is a
natural humility in the great books of confessions: the writers of
sham-confessions are no more capable of the act of bending than a
balloon. It is possible to give the life-story of every sin one has
ever committed and yet to remain dishonest. One may be attitudinising
even while one tells the truth. It is, it may be granted,
extraordinarily difficult to see oneself truly and without bias, and
to refrain from discovering excuses for oneself faster almost than one
discovers one's faults. It is this humbug sense of excuses in the
background that makes most of us the merest pretenders when we confess
that we are blackguards, and call ourselves by other insulting names.
Our confessions are as often as not mean attempts to forestall the
accusations of those we have injured. We make them in the hope of
turning anger into pity, and when the trick has succeeded we laugh in
secret triumph over the simplicity of human nature. Anatole France has
maintained that all the good writers of confessions, from Augustine
onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins. It is
a paradox with the usual grain of truth. The self-analyst, probably
enough, will fall in love with the material on which he works just as
the surgeon does. One has heard surgeons wax enthusiastic over some
unique case of disease which they have cured. They will even speak of
such things as "lovely." It is thus a fighter shakes hands with his
opponent. Similarly, the saint with his sins. For him they will always
be illuminated, as it were, by grace. Saints have even been known to
thank God for their sins as the means of their salvation. On the
other hand, no good book of confessions is mere
play-acting--lip-service to heaven, secret gratitude to the devil.
When confession becomes a luxury of this dramatic sort, one may begin
to suspect oneself as but a refined sort of sensualist. There are
moods of false exaltation in which the confession that one has broken
a commandment seems to add an inch to one's stature. The true
confessor, on the other hand, will as soon confess a mouse as a