Some Reminiscences | Page 6

surely this is no great sin. But the danger lies in the writer
becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of
sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too
cold, too blunt for his purpose--as, in fact, not good enough for his
insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to
snivelling and giggles.
These may seem selfish considerations; but you can't, in sound morals,
condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.
And least of all you can condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly
and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought
and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures,

there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of
opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to
his temptations if not his conscience?
And besides--this, remember, is the place and the moment of perfectly
open talk--I think that all ambitions are lawful except those which
climb upwards on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All
intellectual and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and even
beyond the limit of prudent sanity. They can hurt no one. If they are
mad, then so much the worse for the artist. Indeed, as virtue is said to
be, such ambitions are their own reward. Is it such a very mad
presumption to believe in the sovereign power of one's art, to try for
other means, for other ways of affirming this belief in the deeper appeal
of one's work? To try to go deeper is not to be insensible. An historian
of hearts is not an historian of emotions, yet he penetrates further,
restrained as he may be, since his aim is to reach the very fount of
laughter and tears. The sight of human affairs deserves admiration and
pity. They are worthy of respect too. And he is not insensible who pays
them the undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a
smile which is not a grin. Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but
resignation open-eyed, conscious and informed by love, is the only one
of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.
Not that I think resignation the last word of wisdom. I am too much the
creature of my time for that. But I think that the proper wisdom is to
will what the gods will without perhaps being certain what their will
is--or even if they have a will of their own. And in this matter of life
and art it is not the Why that matters so much to our happiness as the
How. As the Frenchman said, "Il y a toujours la maniere." Very true.
Yes. There is the manner. The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in
indignations and enthusiasms, in judgments--and even in love. The
manner in which, as in the features and character of a human face, the
inner truth is foreshadowed for those who know how to look at their
kind.
Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal
world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as
old as the hills. It rests notably, amongst others, on the idea of Fidelity.
At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or
other can expect to attract much attention I have not been revolutionary

in my writings. The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this,
that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard, absolute
optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and
intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things; but,
imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All claim to special
righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a
philosophical mind should be free. . .
I fear that trying to be conversational I have only managed to be unduly
discursive. I have never been very well acquainted with the art of
conversation--that art which, I understand, is supposed to be lost now.
My young days, the days when one's habits and character are formed,
have been rather familiar with long silences. Such voices as broke into
them were anything but conversational. No. I haven't got the habit. Yet
this discursiveness is not so irrelevant to the handful of pages which
follow. They, too, have been charged with discursiveness, with
disregard of chronological order (which is in itself a crime), with
unconventionality of form (which is an impropriety). I was told
severely that the public would view with displeasure the informal
character of my recollections. "Alas!" I protested mildly. "Could I