Can it really be maintained that this theory applies to
the great diaries of the past? Is it really true that all diaries have been written as a solace for ineffectiveness or as a sub- stitute for creative energy? Pepys and John Evelyn were anything but ineffective, since they lived full constructive lives. Swift and Byron were each of them confident of their own creative genius, yet they each of them wrote diaries. The journals of such typically ineffective people as Amid, Novalis and Barbellion are of such literary excellence as to render them almost works of art. Clearly the facile interro- gation of my French editor must require some qualification. I should restate his suggestion in the form of the following proposition: " No diary has ever possessed intrinsic literary merit ; when it possesses that merit, it is not a diary but something else."
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