The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-11-23
From the New York Post.

Fl om the New York PoSt
 K XACAULAY in his essay on Lord M Byron declared that he never V \ could clearly understand how it
 is that egotism, so unpopular in conver- sation, should be so popular in writing" But in such matters a good deal depends upon the definition of egotism. Montaigne'
 for example, is always talking about himself, and we enjoy it; should we have enjoyed 1t less if could have met him at table and heard the same matter pour from him? Rousseau was one of the great egotists of literature. He did the sort
 of thing which Carlyle asserted to be always acceptable to the public, going off in self conf1agraton for the amuse- ment of the parish" It may be doubted,
 however, if his confessions by word or mouth would have seemed bore There is, of course, a kind of personal vanity which is offensive whether met with in conversation or in a book. It has been said of Charles Sumner that his egotism, in his later years, was so insufferapie as to be an affront to every person he met
 Yet if man is an interesting charac- ter and his experience of life has been varied and entertaining, the unlocking of his heart whether in sonnet or in speech
 would seem to be all one. Everything hangs upon the manner.
 particular form of egotism of au- thors has to do with their feeling about their own works. Recently in England there has been a great deal of gossip con-
 corning Thomas Hardy, and the alleged pains he was expending upon the careful placing of his original manuscripts where posterity might gaze at them, and upon scrupulous editing of his novels so that
 they might reach the next century in the polished form that he would prefer. But
 this appears to have been largely un- founded. The positive announcement that
 Mr. Hardy was shortly to produce a drama has been declared by the Athe-
 naeum to be wholly fictitious And
 he himself. when interrogated about the story that he was busying himself in fil-
 ing a new edition of his Wessex tales.
 said that he was no longer interested in
 them and to take any trouble about their
 reprintipg. Hardy is seemingly of the
 mind of Anatole France, who makes a
 sculptor say, in "Le Lys Rouge: Do
 you imagine that it would be pleasure to me to live among my own works? l krow them far too well; they bore me- It would be easy to cite instances of the opposite temperament. There are many stories of Wordsworth's unaffected delight in re-reading his own poems. Tennyson had weakness for reciting Maud" AS to the particular point of an authors anxiety about the precise iit- erary form in which his works shall reach future generations, it seems to be a case of many men and many minds. The slow producers, the men of the labored | line and the carefully sought phrase, like , FIaubert, naturally are fastidious to the last degree in seeing to it that posterity shall get their final version. This is with some the last infrmity of noble minds. Copous writers are apt to be less careful. The sublime indifference of Shakespeare to what became of his plays | has lately been dwelt upon again by M. Jusserand as one of the wonders in con nection with that wonder worker On the other hand, we have Henry James.
 both prolific and an artist in words, who l assiduously looked after revised reissue
 
 l of his books In that edition he did a l good deal of what, in cue of his short stories, he called ''pricking in lights'' in an authors proof but what the ungodly | would describe as one more illustration | of the method of obscurum per obscurius. 1 It is not only the readers among pos terity, if he is lucky enough to have any, that an authors course in this mat ! ter may affect, but the collectors. If 1 there are to be no variants, no revisions. what becomes of the joy of owning that rare first edition with the misprints in | it. or the youthful indiscretions which the
 writer would have fain recalled or ex- punged later? John Hay would not re-
 print Little Breeches," vet he could not
 escape it during all his lifetime. It pur-
 sued him to England. when lie went there as ambassador, and the line about loaf