I write with a capital I at the risk of being accused of egotism.
Apparently it is more modest to be conceited in the third person, like
the child who says "Tommy is a good boy," or in the first person plural,
like the leader-writer of "The Times," who bids the Continent tremble at
his frown. By a singular fallacy, which ought scarcely to deceive
children, it is forgotten that everything that has ever been written
since the world began has been written by some one person, by an "I,"
though that "I" might have been omitted from the composition or replaced
by the journalistic "we." To some extent the journalist does sink his
personality in that imaginary personality of his paper, a personality
built up, like the human personality, by its past; and the result is a
pompous, colourless, lifeless simulacrum. But in every other department
of letters the trail of the "I" is over every page and every sentence.
The most impersonal essays and poems are all in a sense egoistic.
Everything should really be between inverted commas with an introductory
_Thus say I_. But as these are omitted, as being understood, they come at
last to be _mis_understood.
In the days ere writing was invented, this elementary error was not
possible.
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