Saltren dreaded something of this sort happening now. The fire-work of scandal had, indeed, been muffled up and smothered, when first it began to fizz; but—who could tell?—if it got air again, even through a pin-hole, it would burst into furious conflagration and defy all efforts made to suppress it.
The writer of this story takes this occasion of apologising—if apology be necessary—for the introduction, on more than one occasion, of his own adventures, his own opinions, and, if you will it, his own prejudices into the course of his narrative. He will be told that the author should disappear as a personality, just as the actor merges his individuality in that of the character he represents. He must treat himself as a flower-pot and wrap himself up in the _garde-robe_ of his _dramatis personæ_. I might, of course, have told that story of the flower-pot in the cauldron as having happened to Jingles at Orleigh, but then I could never have told that story again at a dinner-party, for my guest, next but one, would say, “Ah! that happened to my brother, or to my uncle, or to an intimate friend;” and how can I deny that Jingles did not stand in one of these relations to him?
Montaigne, the essayist, was a sad sinner in the introduction of himself into his prose. The essay on which he was engaged might be on the history of Virgil, or Julius Cæsar, but there was certain to creep into it more of Montaigne than of either. The younger Scaliger rebuked him for it, and, after having acquainted the world with the ancestry of Montaigne, he adds, “His great fault is this, that he must needs inform you, ‘For my part I am a lover of white wines or red wines.’ What the Devil signifies it to the public,” adds Scaliger, “whether he is a lover of white wines or red wines?” So, but with more delicacy, and without the introduction of that personage whose name has been written with a capital D, the reader may say to the author, What the blank does it signify what you think, what you like, what you did, whether you ever sat in a cauldron, whether you ever had a flower-pot fall on your head, whether you sought to extinguish it by sitting on it?—go on with your story.
But a man’s personality—I mean my own—is like that piece of pyrotechnic contrivance, a flower-pot. He wraps it up, he smothers it under fold after fold of fiction; but, fizz! fizz! out it comes at last—here, there, on all sides, and cannot be disguised. There is, to be sure, that subterfuge, the use of the first person plural in place of the first person singular, but is it not more vainglorious to talk of We, as if we were royalties, instead of plain and modest I?