"Cara deûm soboles, magnum Jovis incrementum."
—Virgil.
The immense fame and success that Barty Josselin achieved were to him a source of constant disquiet. He could take neither pride nor pleasure in what seemed to him not his; he thought himself a fraud.
Yet only the mere skeleton of his work was built up for him by his demon; all the beauty of form and color, all the grace of movement and outer garb, are absolutely his own.
It has been noticed how few eminent men of letters were intimate with the Josselins, though the best among them—except, of course, Thomas Carlyle—have been so enthusiastic and outspoken in their love and admiration of his work.
He was never at his ease in their society, and felt himself a kind of charlatan.
The fact is, the general talk of such men was often apt to be over his head, as it would have been over mine, and often made him painfully diffident and shy. He needn't have been; he little knew the kind of feeling he inspired among the highest and best.
Why, one day at the Marathonæum, the first and foremost of them all, the champion smiter of the Philistines, the apostle of culture and sweetness and light, told me that, putting Barty's books out of the question, he always got more profit and pleasure out of Barty's society than that of any man he knew.
"It does me good to be in the same room with him; the freshness of the man, his voice, his aspect, his splendid vitality and mother‑wit, his boyish spirit, and the towering genius behind it all. I only wish to goodness I was an intimate friend of his as you are; it would be a liberal education to me!"
But Barty's reverence and admiration for true scholarship and great literary culture in others amounted to absolute awe, and filled him with self‑distrust.
There is no doubt that until he was universally accepted, the crudeness of his literary method was duly criticised with great severity by those professional literary critics who sometimes carp with such a big mouth at their betters, and occasionally kill the Keatses of this world!