firmly from the furnace
into the mould. Can I make such a mould again? Can I count upon the
ingots piled in the fierce flame? Can I reckon upon the same
temperamental glow? I do not know--I fear not.

Here is the net result--that I have become a sort of personage in the
world of letters. Do I desire it? Yes, in a sense I do, but in a sense
I do not. I do not want money, I do not wish for public appearances. I
have no social ambitions. To be pointed out as the distinguished
novelist is distinctly inconvenient. People will demand a certain
standard of talk, a certain brilliance, which I am not in the least
capable of giving them. I want to sit at my ease at the banquet of
life, not to be ushered to the highest rooms. I prefer interesting and
pleasant people to important and majestic persons. Perhaps if I were
more simple-minded, I should not care about the matter at all; just be
grateful for the increased warmth and amenity of life--but I am not
simple-minded, and I hate not fulfilling other people's expectations. I
am not a prodigal, full-blooded, royal sort of person at all. I am not
conscious of greatness, but far more of emptiness. I do not wish to
seem pretentious. I have got this one faculty; but it has outrun all
the rest of me, and I am aware that it has drained the rest of my
nature. The curious thing is that this sort of fame is the thing that
as a young man I used to covet. I used to think it would be so
sustaining and resplendent. Now that it has come to me, in far richer
measure, I will not say than I hoped, but at all events than I had
expected, it does not seem to be a wholly desirable thing. Fame is only
one of the sauces of life; it is not the food of the spirit at all. The
people that praise one are like the courtiers that bow in the anterooms
of a king, through whom he passes to the lonely study where his life is
lived. I am not feeling ungrateful or ungenerous; but I would give all
that I have gained for a new and inspiring friendship, or for the
certainty that I should write another book with the same happiness as I
wrote my last book. Perhaps I ought to feel the responsibility more! I
do feel it in a sense, but I have never estimated the moral
effectiveness of a writer of fiction very high; one comforts rather
than sustains; one diverts rather than feeds. If I could hear of one
self-sacrificing action, one generous deed, one tranquil surrender that
had been the result of my book, I should be more ple