ruth of it to life; the desirable quality seemed
to him to be a sort of arresting daring of statement. He was not a
narrow-minded man at all; he had read a great many books, both old and
new, but he valued specious qualities above everything, and books which
seemed to me to be like the crackling of thorns under a pot seemed to
him to be the glowing heart of the fire. The weakness of my young
friend's case lay, I thought, in the fact that he not only undervalued
experience, but that he evidently did not believe that experience could
have anything to say to him. With the swift insight of youth, he had
discounted all that, and growing older appeared to him to be a mere
stiffening and hardening of prejudices. Where he seemed to me to fail
was in any appreciation of tender, simple, wistful things; as I grow
older, I feel the pathetic charm of life, its hints, its sorrow, its
silence, its infinite dreams, its darkening horizon, more and more
acutely. Of all this he was impatient. His idea was to rejoice in his
strength; he loved, I felt, the sparkling facets of the gem, the
dazzling broken reflections, rather than its inner heart of light. The
question which pressed on me with a painful insistence was this: "Was
he wholly in the right? was I wholly in the wrong?" I am inclined, of
course, to believe that men do their best artistic work in their youth,
while they are passionately just, charmingly indiscreet, relentlessly
severe; before they have learnt the art of compromise or the force of
limitations. I suppose that I, like all other middle-aged writers, am
tempted to think that my own youth is miraculously prolonged; that I
have not lost in fire what I have gained in patience and width of view.
But he would believe that I have lost the glow, and that what seems to
me to be gentle and beautiful experience is but the closing in of
weariness and senility. I have often thought myself that an increase of
accomplishment goes hand-in-hand with an increased tameness of spirit.
And the most pathetic of all writers are, to my mind, those whose
mastery of their art grows as the initial impulse declines. But my
young friend appeared to me to value only prodigal and fantastic
vigour, and to prefer the sword-dance to the minuet.

I began to perceive at last that he was feeling as Hamlet did when the
bones of Yorick were unearthed; with a kind of luxurious pity for my
mouldering conditions; touched, perhaps, a little by the thought that I