THE CONFESSIONAL IN LETTERS.

In the year 1848 Ralph Waldo Emerson of Concord, Mass., made a lecturing tour through England. Among the towns he visited was Coventry, where he was entertained at the residence of Mr. Charles Bray. In the family of Mr. Bray lived a young woman by the name of Mary Ann Evans, and although this Miss Evans was not handsome, either in face or figure, she made a decided impression on Mr. Emerson.

A little excursion was arranged to Stratford, an antiquated town of some note in the same county. On this trip Mr. Emerson and Miss Evans paired off very naturally, and Miss Evans of Coventry was so bold as to set Mr. Emerson of Concord straight on several matters relating to Mr. Shakespeare, formerly of Stratford.

“What is your favorite book?” said Mr. Emerson to Miss Evans, somewhat abruptly.

“Rousseau’s Confessions,” said the young woman instantly.

“And so it is mine,” answered Mr. Emerson.

All of which is related by Moncure D. Conway in a volume entitled Emerson at Home and Abroad.

A copy of Conway’s book was sent to Walt Whitman, and when he read the passage to which I have just referred he remarked, “And so it is mine.”

Emerson and Whitman are probably the two strongest names in American letters, and George Eliot stands first among women writers of all time; and as they in common with many Lesser Wits stand side by side and salute Jean Jacques Rousseau, it may be worth our while to take just a glance at M. Rousseau’s book in order, if we can, to know why it appeals to people of worth.

The first thing about the volume that attracts is the title. There is something charmingly alluring and sweetly seductive in a confession. Mr. Henry James has said: “The sweetest experience that can come to a man on his pilgrimage through this vale of tears is to have a lovely woman ‘confess’ to him; and it is said that while neither argument, threat, plea of justification, nor gold can fully placate a woman who believes she has been wronged by a man, yet she speedily produces, not only a branch, but a whole olive tree when he comes humbly home and confesses.”

Now here is a man about to ’fess to the world, and we take up the volume, glance around to see if any one is looking, and begin at the first paragraph to read:

“I purpose an undertaking that never had an example and the execution of which will never have an imitation. I would exhibit myself to all men as I am—a man....

“Let the last trumpet sound when it will, I will come, with this book in my hand, and present myself before the Sovereign Judge. I will boldly proclaim: Thus have I acted, thus have I thought, such was I. With equal frankness have I disclosed the good and the evil. I have omitted nothing bad, added nothing good. I have exhibited myself, despisable and vile when so; virtuous, generous, sublime when so. I have unveiled my interior being as Thou, Eternal One, hast seen it.” Now where is the man or woman who could stop there, even though the cows were in the corn?

And as we read further we find things that are “unfit for publication” and confessions of sensations that are so universal to healthy men that they are irrelevant, and straightway we arise and lock the door so as to finish the chapter undisturbed. For as superfluous things are the things we cannot do without, so is the irrelevant in literature the necessary.

Having finished this chapter, oblivious to calls that dinner is waiting, we begin the next; and finding items so interesting that they are disgusting, and others so indecent that they are entertaining, we forget the dinner that is getting cold and read on.

And the reason we read on is not because we love the indecent, or because we crave the disgusting, although I believe Burke hints at the contrary, but simply because the writing down of these unbecoming things convinces us that the man is honest and that the confession is genuine. In short we come to the conclusion that any man who deliberately puts himself in such a bad light—caring not a fig either for our approbation or our censure—is no sham.

And there you have it! We want honesty in literature.

The great orator always shows a dash of contempt for the opinions of his audience, and the great writer is he who loses self consciousness and writes himself down as he is, for at the last analysis all literature is a confession.

The Ishmaelites who purvey culture by the ton, and issue magazines that burden the mails—study very carefully the public palate. They know full well that a “confession” is salacious: it is an exposure. A confession implies something that is peculiar, private and distinctly different from what we are used to. It is a removing the veil, a making plain things that are thought and performed in secret.

And so we see articles on “The Women Who Have Influenced Me,” “The Books that Have Made Me,” “My Literary Passions,” etc. But like the circus bills, these titles call for animals that the big tent never shows; and this perhaps is well, for otherwise ’twould fright the ladies.

Yes, I frankly admit that these “confessions” suit the constituency of The Ladies’ Home Journal better than the truth; and although its editor be a Jew, the fact that the writers of his confessions practice careful concealment of the truth that they have hands, senses, eyes, ears, organs, dimensions, passions, is a wise commercial stroke. You can prick them and they do not bleed, tickle them and they do not laugh, poison them and they do not die; simply because they are only puppets parading as certain virtues, and these virtues the own particular brand in which the subscribers delight.

That excellent publication, The Forum, increased its circulation by many thousand when it ran a series of confessions of great men wherein these great men made sham pretense of laying their lives bare before the public gaze. Nothing was told that did not redound to the credit of the confessor. The “Formative Influences” of sin, error and blunders were carefully concealed or calmly waived. The lack of good faith was as apparent in these articles as the rouge on the cheek of a courtesan: the color is genuine and the woman not dead, that’s all.

And the loss lies in this: These writers—mostly able men—sell their souls for a price, and produce a literature that lives the length of life of a moth, whereas they might write for immortality. Instead of inspiring the great, they act as clowns to entertain the rabble.

Of course I know that Rousseau’s Confessions, Amiel’s Journal and Marie Bashkirtseff’s Diary have all been declared carefully worked out artifices. And admitting all the wonderful things that scheming man can perform, I still maintain that there are a few things that life and nature will continue to work out in the old, old way. I appeal to those who have tried both plans, whether it is not easier to tell the truth than to concoct a lie. And I assiduously maintain that if the case is to be tried by a jury of great men, that the shocking facts will serve the end far better than sugared half-truth.

When Richard Le Gallienne tells us of the birth of his baby and for weeks before how White Soul was sure she should die; and Marie Bashkirtseff makes painstaking note of the size of her hips and the development of her bust; and poor Amiel bewails the fate of eating breakfast facing an empty chair; and Rousseau explains the delicate sensations and smells that swept over him on opening his wardrobe and finding smocks and petticoats hanging in careless negligence amid his man’s clothes; and all those other pathetic, foolish, charming, irrelevant bits of prattle, one is convinced of the author’s honesty. No thorough-going literary man, hot for success, would leave such stuff in; he would as soon think of using a flesh brush on the public street; these are his own private affairs—his good sense would have forbade.

A good lie for its own sake is ever pleasing to honest men, but a patched up record never. And when such small men as Samuel Pepys and James Boswell can write immortal books, the moral for the rest of us is that a little honesty is not a dangerous thing.

And so I swing back to the place of beginning and say that while even a sham confession may be interesting to hoi polloi, yet to secure an endorsement from such minds as that of Emerson, George Eliot and Walt Whitman the confession must be genuine.

Elbert Hubbard.