thout some damage here and there to the fine edge of my
conscience, that heirloom of the ages, of the race, of the group, of the
family, colourable and plastic, fashioned by the words, the looks, the
acts, and even by the silences and abstentions surrounding one's
childhood; tinged in a complete scheme of delicate shades
and crude colours by the inherited traditions, beliefs, or
prejudices--unaccountable, despotic, persuasive, and often,
in its texture, romantic.

And often romantic! . . . The matter in hand, however, is to keep these
reminiscences from turning into confessions, a form of literary
activity discredited by Jean Jacques Rousseau on account of the extreme
thoroughness he brought to the work of justifying his own existence;
for that such was his purpose is palpably, even grossly, visible to
an unprejudiced eye. But then, you see, the man was not a writer of
fiction. He was an artless moralist, as is clearly demonstrated by his
anniversaries being celebrated with marked emphasis by the heirs of
the French Revolution, which was not a political movement at all, but
a great outburst of morality. He had no imagination, as the most casual
perusal of "Emile" will prove. He was no novelist, whose first virtue is
the exact understanding of the limits traced by the reality of his time
to the play of his invention. Inspiration comes from the earth, which
has a past, a history, a future, not from the cold and immutable heaven.
A writer of imaginative prose (even more than any other sort of artist)
stands confessed in his works. His conscience, his deeper sense of
things, lawful and unlawful, gives him his attitude before the world.
Indeed, everyone who puts pen to paper for the reading of strangers
(unless a moralist, who, generally speaking, has no conscience except
the one he is at pains to produce for the use of others) can speak of
nothing else. It is M. Anatole France, the most eloquent and just of
French prose-writers, who says that we must recognize at last that,
"failing the resolution to hold our peace, we can only talk of
ourselves."

This remark, if I remember rightly, was made in the course of a sparring
match with the late Ferdinand Brunetiere over the principles and rules
of literary criticism. As was fitting for a man to whom we owe the
memorable saying, "The good critic is he who relates the adventures of
his soul among masterpieces," M. Anatole France maintained that there
were no rules and no princip