Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/17

 and become a commonplace man of business when he applied for a coat of arms or requested his debtors to settle their little accounts.

This raises the previous question of the possibility of the general inference from the book to the man. Now I confess that to me one main interest in reading is always the communion with the author. Paradise Lost gives me the sense of intercourse with Milton, and the Waverley Novels bring me a greeting from Scott. Every author, I fancy, is unconsciously his own Boswell, and, however 'objective' or dramatic he professes to be, really betrays his own secrets. Browning is one of the authorities against me. If Shakespeare, he says, really unlocked his heart in the sonnets, why 'the less Shakespeare he.' Browning declines for his part to follow the example, and fancies that he has preserved his privacy. Yet we must, I think, agree with a critic who emphatically declares that a main characteristic of Browning's own poetry is that it brings us into contact with the real 'self of the author.' Self-revelation is not the less clear because involuntary or quite incidental to the main purpose of a book. I may read Gibbon simply to learn facts; but I enjoy his literary merits because I recognise my friend