Excerpt from View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society Many people believe letters the most personal and revealing form of communication. In them we expect to find the charmer at his nap, slumped, Open-mouthed, profoundly himself without thought for appearances. Yet, this is not quite true. Letters are above all useful as a means of ex pressing the ideal self; and no other method of communi cation is quite so good for this purpose. In conversation, those uneasy eyes upon you, those lips ready with an emen dation before you have begun to speak, are a powerful de terrent to unreality, even to h0pe. In art it is not often possible to make direct use of your dreams of tomorrow and your excuses for yesterday. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.