"I? Impossible!"
"Yes," she insisted. "You are a conversationalist. You are not an elegant, sprucely dressed abbé; you are an abbé who is cynical and ill-natured, who likes to fancy himself a savage amid the comfortable surroundings of the drawing-room."
The Frenchwoman's observation set me to thinking.
Can it be that I am hovering in the vicinity of Apollo's Temple without realizing it?
Possibly my literary life has been merely a journey from the Valley of
Dionysus to the Temple of Apollo. Now somebody will tell me that art
begins only on the bottom step of the Temple of Apollo. And it is true.
But there is where I stop—on the bottom step.
MELLOWNESS AND THE CRITICAL SENSE
Whenever my artistic conscience reproaches me, I always think: If I were to undertake to write these books today, now that I am aware of their defects, I should never write them. Nevertheless, I continue to write others with the same old faults. Shall I ever attain that mellowness of soul in which all the vividness of impression remains, yet in which it has become possible to perfect the expression? I fear not. Most likely, when I reach the stage of refining the expression, I shall have nothing to say, and so remain silent.
SENSIBILITY
In my books, as in most that are modern, there is an indefinable resentment against life and against society.
Resentment against life is of far more ancient standing than resentment against society.