"I suppose I might," I sigh. The answer is faint; but the deed is decreed. Shall I be sorry for it?
It is a gray day, on gray Cape Ann, as I write these words. The fog is breathing over the downs. The outside steamers shriek from off the Point, as they feel their way at live of noon, groping as though it were dead of night, and stars and coast-lights all were smitten dark, and every pilot were a stranger to his chart.
A stranger to my chart, I, doubtful, put about, and make the untried coast.
At such a moment, one thinks wistfully of that fair, misty world which is all one's own, yet on the outside of which one stands so humbly, and so gently. One thinks of the unseen faces, of the unknown friends who have read one's tales of other people's lives, and cared to read, and told one so, and made one believe in their kindness, and affection and fidelity for thirty years. And the hesitating heart calls out to them: Will you let me be sorry? Thirty years! It is a good while that you and I have kept step together. Shall we miss it now? If you will care to hear such chapters as may select themselves from the story of the story-teller,—you have the oldest right to choose, and I, the happy will to please you if I can.
The lives of the makers of books are very much like other people's in most respects, but especially in this: that they are either rebels to, or subjects of, their ancestry. The lives of some literary persons begin a good while after they are born. Others begin a good while before.
Of this latter kind is mine.
It has sometimes occurred to me to find myself the possessor of a sort of unholy envy of writers concerning whom our stout American phrase says that they have "made themselves." What delight to be aware that one has not only created one's work, but the worker! What elation in the remembrance of the battle against a commercial, or a scientific, or a worldly and superficial heredity; in the recollection of the tug with habit and education, and the overthrow of impulses setting in other directions than the chosen movement of one's own soul!
What pleasure in the proud knowledge that all one's success is one's own doing, and the sum of it cast up to one's credit upon the long ledger of life! To this exhilarating self-content I can lay no claim. For whatever measure of what is called success has fallen to my lot, I can ask no credit. I find myself in the chastened position of one whose literary abilities all belong to one's ancestors.
It is humbling—I do not deny that it may be morally invigorating—to feel that whatever is "worth mentioning" in my life is no affair of mine, but falls under the beautiful and terrible law by which the dead men and women whose blood bounds in our being control our destinies.