Page:Under Dispute (1924).pdf/105

 uine intellectual and artistic gifts. The immensity of her self-love and self-pity (she could be more sorry for her own troubles than anybody who ever lived) steeped her pages in an ignoble emotionalism. She was often unhappy; but she revelled in her unhappiness, and summoned the Almighty to give it his serious attention. Her overmastering interest in herself made writing about herself a secret and passionate delight.

There must always be a different standard for the confessions which, like Rousseau's, are made voluntarily to the world, and the confessions which, like Mr. Pepys's, are disinterred by the world from the caches where the confessants concealed them. Not content with writing in a cipher, which must have been a deal of trouble, the great diarist confided his most shameless passages to the additional cover of Spanish, French, Greek and Latin,