Of all this he was impatient. His idea was to rejoice in his
strength; he loved, I felt, the sparkling facets of the gem, the
dazzling broken reflections, rather than its inner heart of light. The
question which pressed on me with a painful insistence was this: "Was
he wholly in the right? was I wholly in the wrong?" I am inclined, of
course, to believe that men do their best artistic work in their youth,
while they are passionately just, charmingly indiscreet, relentlessly
severe; before they have learnt the art of compromise or the force of
limitations. I suppose that I, like all other middle-aged writers, am
tempted to think that my own youth is miraculously prolonged; that I
have not lost in fire what I have gained in patience and width of view.
But he would believe that I have lost the glow, and that what seems to
me to be gentle and beautiful experience is but the closing in of
weariness and senility. I have often thought myself that an increase of
accomplishment goes hand-in-hand with an increased tameness of spirit.
And the most pathetic of all writers are, to my mind, those whose
mastery of their art grows as the initial impulse declines. But my
young friend appeared to me to value only prodigal and fantastic
vigour, and to prefer the sword-dance to the minuet.
I began to perceive at last that he was feeling as Hamlet did when the
bones of Yorick were unearthed; with a kind of luxurious pity for my
mouldering conditions; touched, perhaps, a little by the thought that I
was excluded from the bright and brave shows of earth, and sadly
conscious of the odour of corruption.
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