and spirited, now poignant and terrible, was part of himself. He might have said of it more truly than Walt Whitman said of "Leaves of Grass," that whoever laid hold upon the book laid hold upon a man.
To ask that the autobiographer should "know himself as a realist, and deal with himself as an artist," is one way of demanding perfection. Realists are plentiful, and their ranks are freshly recruited every year. Artists are rare, and grow always rarer in an age which lacks the freedom, the serenity, the sense of proportion, essential to their development. It has happened from time to time that a single powerful and sustained emotion has forced from a reticent nature an unreserved and illuminating disclosure. Newman's "Apologia pro Vita sua" was written with an avowed purpose—to make clear the sincerity of his religious life, and to refute a charge of deceitfulness.
