the open display of emotion fail to move, then it must perish
unavoidably in disgust or contempt. No artist can be reproached for
shrinking from a risk which only fools run to meet and only genius dare
confront with impunity. In a task which mainly consists in laying one's
soul more or less bare to the world, a regard for decency, even at
the cost of success, is but the regard for one's own dignity which is
inseparably united with the dignity of one's work.

And then--it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this
earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of
pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity
for suffering which makes man August in the eyes of men) have their
source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling com passion
as the common inheritance of us all. Joy and sorrow in this world pass
into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight
of life as mysterious as an over shadowed ocean, while the dazzling
brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the
distant edge of the horizon.

Yes! I, too, would like to hold the magic wand giving that command over
laughter and tears which is declared to be the highest achievement of
imaginative literature. Only, to be a great magician one must surrender
oneself to occult and irresponsible powers, either outside or within
one's breast. We have all heard of simple men selling their souls for
love or power to some grotesque devil. The most ordinary intelligence
can perceive without much reflection that anything of the sort is bound
to be a fool's bargain. I don't lay claim to particular wisdom because
of my dislike and distrust of such transactions. It may be my sea
training acting upon a natural disposition to keep good hold on the
one thing really mine, but the fact is that I have a positive horror of
losing even for one moving moment that full possession of my self which
is the first condition of good service. And I have carried my notion of
good service from my earlier into my later existence. I, who have never
sought in the written word anything else but a form of the Beautiful--I
have carried over that article of creed from the decks of ships to the
more circumscribed space of my desk, and by that act, I suppose, I have
become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the ineffable company of
pure esthetes.

As in political so in literary action a ma