nobody; a friend has a face, the public has not; a friend is a being,
present, hearing, looking, a real being--the public is an invisible
being, a being of the reason, an abstraction; a friend has a name, and
the public is anonymous; a friend is a confidant, and the public is a
fiction. I blush before the one, because he is a man; I do not blush
before the other, because it is an idea. When I write or speak before the
public, I feel myself as free, as exempt from the susceptibilities of one
man to another, as if I were speaking or writing before God and in the
desert; the crowd is a solitude; you see it, you know that it exists, but
you know it only as a mass. As an individual it does not exist. Now this
modesty of which you speak, being the respect of one's self before some
other person, when there is no person distinct on account of the
multitude, becomes without a motive. Psyche blushed under a lamp because
the hand of a single god passed over her, but when the sun gazed at her
with his thousand rays from the height of Olympus, that personification
of the modest soul did not blush before the whole heaven. Here is the
exact image of the modesty of a writer before a single auditor, and of
the freedom of his utterance before all the world. Do you accuse me of
violating mysteries before you? You have not the right: I do not know
you, I have confided nothing to you personally. You are guilty of
impropriety in reading what is not addressed to you. You are _somebody_,
you are not the public. What do you want with me? I have not spoken to
you: you have nothing to say to me, and I nothing to reply.

So thought St. Augustine, Plato, Socrates, Cicero, Cæsar, Bernardin de
St. Pierre, Montaigne, Alfieri, Chateaubriand, and all other men who have
confided to the world the genuine palpitations of their own hearts. True
gladiators they are in the human Colosseum, not playing miserable
comedies of sentiment and style to distract an academy, but struggling
and dying in earnest on the stage of the world, and writing on the sand,