“Well, this is good news! At last you’ll do something.”
“My dear fellow, it is the opposite of good news. I shall do something, no doubt; but it will be drudgery of some kind to earn a living. There is nothing more to come out of me than that.”
“Humbug! You are not as old as I am.”
“No, but old enough to have seen the end of my tether.”
“Why don’t you go in for writing?”
“Because I am unable to. I can enjoy other men’s work, but I can produce none of my own.”
“Of course not, if you take it for granted. You could if you made up your mind to.”
“Don’t forget that that making up of the mind is everything; it is the very ability which I lack. But literature is a vain thought. How is it for a moment to be imagined that I could earn a sufficient income by it? I have written verses at times; you don’t advise me to go into the market with those wares? Journalism I am utterly unfit for, as you must recognise. Equally unfit to write for magazines; I have neither knowledge nor versatility. There remains fiction, and for that I am vastly too subjective; I have no ‘shaping spirit of imagination’—at all events not of the commercially valuable kind. If I had lived in days when Undine and Sintram were the approved style, I should probably have been tempted to try my hand; but now——”
“Because,” he continued, “you are blessed with genius and will, you think all men should, can do great things by dint of mere exertion. I shall never do anything; do you understand? And why should I? There are other ways of enjoying life.”
“What other ways?” Gabriel asked, strangely.