When a man has been intangibly blind for a long time, he usually stumbles at last, accidentally, upon an incident or challenge that makes him totter on the edge of vision, and in that moment it is revealed whether this blindness has been innate or not. If he wavers, then his lack of sight has been an artificial ailment, and if his first reaction after the stumble is one of stubborn irritation his tightly-shut eyes are not apt to open. Carl felt, without quite being able to shape the picture, that he was walking out of a sublime bric-a-brac shop, and yet the contact of him, left behind in the shop, continued to speak with his words. As he discussed poetry with Clara he began slowly to feel that he had been a minute and prisoned fool, although his words writhed in an effort to escape an absolute admission. She gave him practical scoldings, also, concerning the exact way in which manuscripts should be submitted to editors, and he listened with the amusement that a man feels when he suddenly sees that he has been walking along a street with his shoes unlaced. She gave him, again and again, her hazily maternal smile in which sensual desires selfishly clothed themselves in an ancient and soothing dress known as kindness.
“I do hope that I’ve helped you,” she said. “I’d like to feel that I’ve aided someone to discover his real self.”
When he returned to his room he applied a match to everything that he had ever written and watched the flaming pile of papers with an emotion in which dread, tenderness, and elation were oddly contending against each other. These bits of paper, with their symbols of shimmering confusion, had been decorated by the sweat of his body, the brittle despair of his heart, and the anger of his soul, and their death brought him a helpless and jumbled sadness; but gradually another reaction began to possess him. The naked quivers of a fighter, crouched in the plan of his first blow, centered around his heart, and all of the thoughts within his mind gave one shout in unison—a meaningless hurrah just before the first leap of a creative battle. During the next two months he wrote with an insane speed, and all of his thoughts and emotions rushed out in an irresistible, nondescript mob scene—a French Revolution swinging its torches and howls against every repression and constraint within him. Good, bad, and mediocre, they rain in the circles of a celebrated revenge, and his main purpose was expressed in these first four lines of one of his poems:
You have escaped the comedy
Of swift, pretentious praise and blame,
And smashed a tavern where they sell
The harlot’s wine that men call fame.