MEMOIRS, CONVERSATIONS AND DIARIES
537
a delight. All of the people are now dead and those who do not
survive by their art or historical significance are dead completely,
except as they live on for the occasional Goncourt fan or in other
documents of the period. Some lively creatures would, no doubt,
choose immortality on any terms rather than face the utter oblivion
of their names. Yet we do not know this for a certainty; the question
cannot even be truly put to the sufferer, since the permanence of a
portrait, vicious or pleasing, cannot be known for a long time. A
shrewd person might even say:
If
the book is a masterpiece I don't
mind being atrociously present, because even mediocrities or cads,
brilliantly drawn, have a kind of grandeur-but if it is second-rate,
leave me out!
In England and America where the temptation to the direct
use of actual personages is so buried in hesitation, where so much
seems to forbid, the practice may be attended by malice and deliberate
distortion; some goddess of revenge and brutality may in fact hold
the hand of the muse of history. Nevertheless, writers and readers
alike have a rich interest in the living personality, an interest which
does not blush even before the squalid or ludicrous revelation.
If
we do not practice the memoir or diary with unfaltering confidence,
we have the
roman
a
clef
and satires like Pope's. These forms are
allowed to be far more brutal than mere reportage; in the latter
a certain body of fact must be observed; accuracy is all. In the
novel or satire, every effort is made to identify without actually
naming the fleshly reality, but once the identity is clear no restraints
at all are put upon the free exercise of a malicious imagination. The
author can pick and choose as he likes, exaggerate, invent; indeed
he is obliged to swell here and shrink there from the necessity of
creating a "character," which cannot have the exact fullness and
queerness of life, but must be "exposed" more neatly, according to
the demands of art. This method
is
less useful for "history," but it is
brilliantly effective in inflicting an injury upon the living. The poor
victim cannot say he has been falsely reported, since it is his very
soul which is being examined; grimy motives and degrading weak–
nesses he has never expressed are gaily attributed to him by the
satirist. Almost anyone, in his lifetime, would prefer the "pinning
down" of the Goncourts to the crucifixion of "The Dunciad."
Yet even with contemporary silence the sensitive celebrity can-
