"You are incorrigible, Lucio!" I said--"But your cheerfulness is very
inspiriting. All I wanted to explain to you is this,--that my book
expresses a certain tone of thought which purporting to be _mine_, is
not _me_,--in short, I, in my present self have no sympathy with it. I
must have changed very much since I wrote it."
"Changed? Why yes, I should think so!" and Lucio laughed heartily--"The
possession of five millions is bound to change a man considerably for
the better--or worse! But you seem to be worrying yourself most absurdly
about nothing. Not one author in many centuries writes from his own
heart or as he truly feels--when he does, he becomes well-nigh immortal.
This planet is too limited to hold more than one Homer, one Plato, one
Shakespeare. Don't distress yourself--you are neither of these three!
You belong to the age, Tempest,--it is a decadent ephemeral age, and
most things connected with it are decadent and ephemeral. Any era that
is dominated by the love of money only, has a rotten core within it and
must perish. All history tells us so, but no one accepts the lesson of
history. Observe the signs of the time,--Art is made subservient to the
love of money--literature, politics and religion the same,--_you_ cannot
escape from the general disease. The only thing to do is to make the
best of it,--no one can reform it--least of all you, who have so much
of the lucre given to your share."
He paused,--I was silent, watching the bright fire-glow and the dropping
red cinders.
"What I am going to say now," he proceeded in soft, almost melancholy
accents--"will sound ridiculously trite,--still it has the perverse
prosiness of truth about it. It is this--in order to write with intense
feeling, you must first _feel_. Very likely when you wrote this book of
yours, you were almost a human hedge-hog in the way of feeling. Every
prickly point of you was erect and responsive to the touch of all
influences, pleasant or the reverse, imaginative or realistic. This is a
condition which some people envy and others would rather dispense with.
Now that you, as a hedge-hog, have no further need for either alarm,
indignation or self-defence, your prickles are soothed into an agreeable
passiveness, and you partially cease to feel. That is all. The 'change'
you complain of is thus accounted for;--you have nothing to feel
about,--hence you cannot comprehend how it was that you ever felt."