It has been maintained, on the other hand, that many persons cannot write more than one novel,--that all after that are likely to be failures .-- Life is so much more tremendous a thing in its heights and depths than any transcript of it can be, that all records of human experience are as so many bound herbaria to the innumerable glowing, glistening, rustling, breathing, fragrance-laden, poison-sucking, life-giving, death-distilling leaves and flowers of the forest and the prairies.

All we can do with books of human experience is to make them alive again with something borrowed from our own lives.

We can make a book alive for us just in proportion to its resemblance in essence or in form to our own experience.

Now an author's first novel is naturally drawn, to a great extent, from his personal experiences; that is, is a literal copy of nature under various slight disguises.

But the moment the author gets out of his personality, he must have the creative power, as well as the narrative art and the sentiment, in order to tell a living story; and this is rare.
Besides, there is great danger that a man's first life-story shall clean him out, so to speak, of his best thoughts.