nd virtue, what were St.
Augustine, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Montaigne, all those men
Who have silently interrogated their souls and replied aloud, so that
their dialogue with themselves might also be a useful conversation with
the century in which they lived, or with the future. The human heart is
an instrument which has neither the same number nor quality of chords in
every bosom, and on which new notes may eternally be discovered and added
to the infinite scale of sentiments and melodies in the universe. This is
our part, poets and writers in spite of ourselves, rhapsodists of the
endless poem that nature chants to men and God! Why accuse me, if you
excuse yourselves? Are we not of the same family of the _Homeridae_, who
from door to door recount histories, of which they are by turns the
historians and the heroes? Is it, then, in the nature of thought to
become a crime in becoming public? A thought, vulgar, critical,
skeptical, dogmatic, may, according to you, be unvailed innocently:
a sentiment, commonplace, cold, not intimate, awaking no palpitation
within you, no response in others, may be revealed without violation of
modesty; but a thought that is pious, ardent, lighted at the fire of the
heart or of heaven, a sentiment burning, cast forth by an explosion of
the volcano of the soul; a cry of the inmost nature, awaking by its
accent of truth young and sympathetic voices in the present age or the
future: and above all, a tear! a tear not painted like those which flow
upon your shrouds of parade, a tear of water and salt, falling from the
eyes, instead of a drop of ink, falling from the pen! This is crime! this
is shame! this is immodesty, for you! That is to say, that whatever is
cold and artificial is innocent in the artist, but what is warm and
natural is unpardonable in the man. That is to say, modesty in a writer
consists in exposing what is false, immodesty in setting forth what is
true. If you have talent, show it, but not your soul, carrying mine away!
Oh, shame! What logic!

But after all, you are right at bottom, only you do not know how to
express it. It is perfectly true that there are mysteries, nudities,
parts of the soul not shameful but sensitive, depths, personalities, last
foldings of thought and feeling, which would cost horribly to uncover,
and which an honorable and natural scruple would never permit us to lay
bare, without the remorse of violated modesty. There is, I agree with
y