"These are local and popular incidents I have mentioned, but in a measure all literature, all art has created impossible dreams, unattainable ideals. This is probably the reason why so many aspirations have failed. They were not founded on reality. There are in life considerations 'without which the noblest dreams are a form of opium eating.' Who knows how many have gone grieving through life because they have followed the phantoms conjured up by the false standards of art? With all that is great and grand, heroic and epic in real life there is still such a thing as
'The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky.'
"Anyway, it is about time to protest against the false heroes of paper and ink, who cut us out of our earthly paradise, to give our rivals in fiction the death stab; about time to remember that that which is not cannot be great, and that all the beauty of this universe is in real life. It is about time to deny the existence of that which does not exist.
"This demand for the superhuman is inhuman. We are not what we are not. We cannot do what we cannot do, and these platitudes are as profound as they are obvious. The weakness of the world is pointed out by its heromania. That we look for our heroes not in life but in artificial creations shows how blind we are. The most striking sign of our imperfection is our longing for impossible perfection. Life has a great grudge against art. It has been slighted, disregarded, abused. With its misleading models it has set up an unjust competition against life. The hope is that the artists to come will give life a hearing and adjust matters. As for the novelists, every time the good Mr. Howells horsewhips the swashbucklers I heartily applaud him. But I am not going to lay down any principles. I don't feel like it to-day. Perhaps things as they were were for the best. Perhaps it is for the dreams of women that there are real men in the world to-day. Perhaps it is their longing for the impossible that made the best that is possible to-day. I sometimes think that a woman's reason is the very acme of all wisdom. But I am going to treat this thing more fully in my volume of essays—if I ever get around to writing them."
XXIV On Enjoying One's Own Writings
I was alone, ensconced in a corner of the noisy, smoky café, perusing the pages of a valued volume. Keidansky walked in hastily, took up my book and looked at it.
"How can you read anything that you have not written yourself?" he asked, with surprising solemnity. "Why, I don't mind it any longer; I am used to it now," I mumbled in astonishment. But conversations with Keidansky are one-sided. Before I had formed half a thought he was all ready with speech.