s a manifestation of criticism (for it would be
outrageous to deny to the general public the possession of a critical
mind) the reception was very satisfactory. I saw that I had managed to
please a certain number of minds busy attending to their own very real
affairs. It is agreeable to think one is able to please. From the minds
whose business it is precisely to criticize such attempts to please,
this book received an amount of discussion and of a rather searching
analysis which not only satisfied that personal vanity I share with the
rest of mankind but reached my deeper feelings and aroused my gratified
interest. The undoubted sympathy informing the varied appreciations of
that book was, I love to think, a recognition of my good faith in the
pursuit of my art--the art of the novelist which a distinguished French
writer at the end of a successful career complained of as being: _Trop
difficile!_ It is indeed too arduous in the sense that the effort must
be invariably so much greater than the possible achievement. In that
sort of foredoomed task which is in its nature very lonely also,
sympathy is a precious thing. It can make the most severe criticism
welcome. To be told that better things have been expected of one may be
soothing in view of how much better things one had expected from oneself
in this art which, in these days, is no longer justified by the
assumption, somewhere and somehow, of a didactic purpose.

I do not mean to hint that anybody had ever done me the injury (I don't
mean insult, I mean injury) of charging a single one of my pages with
didactic purpose. But every subject in the region of intellect and
emotion must have a morality of its own if it is treated at all
sincerely; and even the most artful of writers will give himself (and
his morality) away in about every third sentence. The varied shades of
moral significance which have been discovered in my writings are very
numerous. None of them, however, have provoked a hostile manifestation.
It may have happened to me to sin against taste now and then, but
apparently I have never sinned against the basic feelings and elementary
convictions which make life possible to the mass of mankind and, by
establishing a standard of judgment, set their idealism free to look for
plainer ways, for higher feelings, for deeper purposes.

I cannot say that any particular moral complexion has been put on this
novel but I do not think that anybody had detected in it an