PEOPLE AND THINGS
By HAROLD NICOLSON
RECEIVED the other day a letter from the editor of a
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Paris newspaper in which he asked me two questions. The first question was " Did I still keep a diary?" The second question was " Did I consider that the diary habit was destructive of creative genius?" To the first question I answered that I had kept a careful diary for many years. To the second question I answered that, not possessing even the rudiments of creative genius, I did not regard myself as evidence ; but I admitted in principle that the art of the diarist is secondary or even parasitic. On thinking it over afterwards I came to the conclusion that there was something in this theory that no great diarists were creative geniuses and that few creative geniuses kept diaries. The diarist, as the conversationalist, is apt to dissipate in diurnal leakage those reservoirs of experience, under the hydraulic pressure of which great writing is produced. The diary is the resort of smaller natures. " I enjoy," Wilde once remarked, " the company of minor poets, since they put into their conversa- tion what they leave out of their books." The reverse is also true. Great authors leave out of their conversation what they put into their books, and since the diary is a form of conversation, or interior monologue, great authors do not bother to keep diaries.
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