“I’m sorry to hear this,” he answered, with twinkling eyes—“From what you say it appears to me you have been guilty of literary sublimity. Oh bad, very bad! Nothing can be worse. To write sublimely is a grievous sin, and one which critics never forgive. I’m really grieved for you, my friend—I never thought your case was quite so desperate.”
I laughed in spite of my depression.
“You are incorrigible, Lucio!” I said—“But your cheerfulness is very inspiriting. All I wanted to explain to you is this,—that my book expresses a certain tone of thought which purporting to be mine, is not me,—in short, I, in my present self have no sympathy with it. I must have changed very much since I wrote it.”
“Changed? Why yes, I should think so!” and Lucio laughed heartily—“The possession of five millions is bound to change a man considerably for the better—or worse! But you seem to be worrying yourself most absurdly about nothing. Not one author in many centuries writes from his own heart or as he truly feels—when he does, he becomes well-nigh immortal. This planet is too limited to hold more than one Homer, one Plato, one Shakespeare. Don’t distress yourself—you are neither of these three! You belong to the age, Tempest,—it is a decadent ephemeral age, and most things connected with it are decadent and ephemeral. Any era that is dominated by the love of money only, has a rotten core within it and must perish. All history tells us so, but no one accepts the lesson of history. Observe the signs of the time,—Art is made subservient to the love of money—literature, politics and religion the same,—you cannot escape from the general disease. The only thing to do is to make the best of it,—no [p 77] one can reform it—least of all you, who have so much of the lucre given to your share.”
He paused,—I was silent, watching the bright fire-glow and the dropping red cinders.
“What I am going to say now,” he proceeded in soft, almost melancholy accents—“will sound ridiculously trite,—still it has the perverse prosiness of truth about it. It is this—in order to write with intense feeling, you must first feel. Very likely when you wrote this book of yours, you were almost a human hedge-hog in the way of feeling. Every prickly point of you was erect and responsive to the touch of all influences, pleasant or the reverse, imaginative or realistic. This is a condition which some people envy and others would rather dispense with. Now that you, as a hedge-hog, have no further need for either alarm, indignation or self-defence, your prickles are soothed into an agreeable passiveness, and you partially cease to feel. That is all. The ‘change’ you complain of is thus accounted for;—you have nothing to feel about,—hence you cannot comprehend how it was that you ever felt.”
I was conscious of irritation at the calm conviction of his tone.
“Do you take me for such a callous creature as all that?” I exclaimed—“You are mistaken in me, Lucio. I feel most keenly——”
“What do you feel?” he inquired, fixing his eyes steadily upon me—“There are hundreds of starving wretches in this metropolis,—men and women on the brink of suicide because they have no hope of anything in this world or the next, and no sympathy from their kind—do you feel for them? Do their griefs affect you? You know they do not,—you know you never think of them,—why should you? One of the chief advantages of wealth is the ability it gives us to shut out other people’s miseries from our personal consideration.”
I said nothing,—for the first time my spirit chafed at the truth of his words, principally because they were true. [p 78] Alas, Lucio!—if I had only known then what I know now!