Some Reminiscences | Page 5

what the French would call secheresse du coeur. Fifteen years of
unbroken silence before praise or blame testify sufficiently to my
respect for criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the

garden of letters. But this is more of a personal matter, reaching the
man behind the work, and therefore it may be alluded to in a volume
which is a personal note in the margin of the public page. Not that I feel
hurt in the least. The charge--if it amounted to a charge at all--was
made in the most considerate terms; in a tone of regret.
My answer is that if it be true that every novel contains an element of
autobiography--and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can
only express himself in his creation--then there are some of us to whom
an open display of sentiment is repugnant. I would not unduly praise
the virtue of restraint. It is often merely temperamental. But it is not
always a sign of coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing more
humiliating than to see the shaft of one's emotion miss the mark either
of laughter or tears. Nothing more humiliating! And this for the reason
that should the mark be missed, should the open display of emotion fail
to move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust or contempt. No
artist can be reproached for shrinking from a risk which only fools run
to meet and only genius dare confront with impunity. In a task which
mainly consists in laying one's soul more or less bare to the world, a
regard for decency, even at the cost of success, is but the regard for
one's own dignity which is inseparably united with the dignity of one's
work.
And then--it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this
earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of
pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity
for suffering which makes man august in the eyes of men) have their
source in weaknesses which must be recognised with smiling
compassion as the common inheritance of us all. Joy and sorrow in this
world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in
the twilight of life as mysterious as an over-shadowed ocean, while the
dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still,
on the distant edge of the horizon.
Yes! I too would like to hold the magic wand giving that command
over laughter and tears which is declared to be the highest achievement
of imaginative literature. Only, to be a great magician one must
surrender oneself to occult and irresponsible powers, either outside or
within one's own breast. We have all heard of simple men selling their
souls for love or power to some grotesque devil. The most ordinary

intelligence can perceive without much reflection that anything of the
sort is bound to be a fool's bargain. I don't lay claim to particular
wisdom because of my dislike and distrust of such transactions. It may
be my sea-training acting upon a natural disposition to keep good hold
on the one thing really mine, but the fact is that I have a positive horror
of losing even for one moving moment that full possession of myself
which is the first condition of good service. And I have carried my
notion of good service from my earlier into my later existence. I, who
have never sought in the written word anything else but a form of the
Beautiful, I have carried over that article of creed from the decks of
ships to the more circumscribed space of my desk; and by that act, I
suppose, I have become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the
ineffable company of pure esthetes.
As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself
mostly by the passion of his prejudices and by the consistent
narrowness of his outlook. But I have never been able to love what was
not lovable or hate what was not hateful, out of deference for some
general principle. Whether there be any courage in making this
admission I know not. After the middle turn of life's way we consider
dangers and joys with a tranquil mind. So I proceed in peace to declare
that I have always suspected in the effort to bring into play the
extremities of emotions the debasing touch of insincerity. In order to
move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried
away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility--innocently enough
perhaps and of necessity, like an actor who raises his voice on the stage
above the pitch of natural conversation--but still we have to do that.
And