Times, however, change (as has frequently been observed). What is sauce for the goose is not always sauce for the gander. That is to say, other days other ways. I do not know that I gathered (that evening at the club) what was the upshot of the matter in this instance between the man of whom I am speaking and the publisher. But it is to be feared that time had blown upon those things of his of other days as it had upon the temple of his soul and its inhabitant.
Well (so the story goes), the world went forward at a dizzy rate. There was flame and sword. Ministries rose and fell. Dynasties passed away. Customs handed down from antiquity, and honored among the ancients, were obliterated by mandate and statute. And man wrought things of many sorts in new ways.
On a Friday at about half past two (a pleasant day it was, in the Spring, with new buds coming out in the parks and a new generation of children all about) again in came our old friend to see his friend the publisher. Well, well, and how was he now, and what was new with him? Why, a rotten bad run of cards had been his ever since he had been round before: rheumatism and influenza, dentist and oculist, wife down and brother dead, nothing much accomplished. He sat for a moment and there was no light in him. No (you saw it now, quite), he was a lamp without oil.
He undid the package containing his manuscript. Here was a book (those yellow clippings), well, here was a book! This was a younger book than either of his others. On it was the gleaming dew of his youth. Perhaps a little scrappy, very brief, and, many of them, rather unequal in length—these things; and very light. Ah, that was the point, that was the point! The lightness, the freshness, the spontaneity, the gaiety of the springtime of life! One could not recapture that. It would be impossible, quite impossible, for him now to write such things as these. He did not now think the same way, feel, see the same way, work—the same way. No, no; there comes a hardening of the spiritual and intellectual arteries. This was a younger book, a younger book (and as he leaned forward with finger raised, a light, for an instant, flickered again in his eye) than any of his others.
* * * * *
There was a man at that club when this story was told who remarked: "It is said (is it not?) that Swift, re-reading 'Gulliver' many years after it was written, exclaimed: 'My God, what a genius I had at that time!'"
And another man there at the time reminded us of the place somewhere in the books of George Moore where it is observed that "anybody can have talent at twenty, the thing is to have talent at fifty."
R. C. H.
New York, 1919.