Truth, Aug. 19, 1886.
"Nous avons changé tout cela!"
Hoity-toity! my dear Henry!—What is all this? How can you startle the "Constant Reader," Truth, Sept. 2, 1886. of this cold world, by these sudden dashes into the unexpected?
Perceive also what happens.
Sweet in the security of my own sense of things, and looking upon you surely as the typical "Sapem" of modern progress and civilization, here do I, in full Paris, à l'heure de l'absinthe, upon mischievous discussion intent, call aloud for "Truth."
"Vous allez voir," I say to the brilliant brethren gathered about my table, "you shall hear the latest beautiful thing and bold, said by our great Henry—'capable de tout,' beside whom 'ce coquin d'Habacuc' was mild indeed and usual!" And straightway to my stultification, I find myself translating paragraphs of pathos and indignation, in which a colourless old gentleman of the Academy is sympathized with, and made a doddering hero of, for no better reason than that he is old—and those who would point out the wisdom and comfort of his withdrawal into the wigwam of private life, sternly reproved and anathematized and threatened with shame—until they might well expect to find themselves come upon by the bears of the aged and irascible, though bald-headed, Prophet, whom the children had thoughtfully urged to "go up."
Fancy the Frenchmen's astonishment as I read, and their placid amusement as I attempted to point out that it was "meant drolly—that enfin you were a mystificateur!"
Henry, why should I thus be mortified? Also, why this new pose, this cheap championship of senility?
How, in the name of all that is incompetent, do you find much virtue in work spreading over more time! What means this affectation of naïveté?
We all know that work excuses itself only by reason of its quality.