I
thought to myself that here was an opportunity of turning inside out
the mind of a very young and intelligent man. I might learn, I thought,
what the new ideas were, the direction in which the younger generation
were tending. Now, it would be invidious to mention the names of the
books that we discussed. Many of the volumes that he ranked very high,
I had not even read; and he was equally at sea in the old books that
seemed to me the most vital and profound. I discovered that the art
that he preferred was a kind of brilliant impressionism. He did not
care much about the truth of it to life; the desirable quality seemed
to him to be a sort of arresting daring of statement. He was not a
narrow-minded man at all; he had read a great many books, both old and
new, but he valued specious qualities above everything, and books which
seemed to me to be like the crackling of thorns under a pot seemed to
him to be the glowing heart of the fire. The weakness of my young
friend's case lay, I thought, in the fact that he not only undervalued
experience, but that he evidently did not believe that experience could
have anything to say to him. With the swift insight of youth, he had
discounted all that, and growing older appeared to him to be a mere
stiffening and hardening of prejudices. Where he seemed to me to fail
was in any appreciation of tender, simple, wistful things; as I grow
older, I feel the pathetic charm of life, its hints, its sorrow, its
silence, its infinite dreams, its darkening horizon, more and more
acutely.
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