Page:Studies of a Biographer 3.djvu/46

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
34
STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER

the success of this particular performance. I am, I must frankly confess, not equal to solving this point of casuistry. Like other such problems, it cannot be solved by any distinct rule; and all that one can do is to recognise the possibility of some bad consequences and reserve a right to condemn the next follower. There is, indeed, one other question. Admitting fully that the story ought to be told, that we had a right to be aware of this ennobling element in the lives of two such persons, was it really necessary that the whole correspondence should be published or the whole destroyed? I cannot help fancying that some one might have been found—though, no doubt, the task would have required very exceptional tact and insight—who could have given the truth without publishing the correspondence in mass. Undoubtedly it would have been necessary to use the words of the writers and to publish some of the letters completely. But the sense of impropriety which besets one every now and then in reading—that uncomfortable suspicion that one is, after all, an eavesdropper—is purely due to the following all the little ins and outs through so long a correspondence, and the feeling that one is looking over the shoulders of the writers at a moment when they