s how, after he found it out, to make the most of his
gift. It had no power to make much or little of him. If he cherished it
and served it, when he had made sure of it, by fulfilling the law that
its possession imposed, then it would rise up in something he had done
and call him master.

But how could Eugenio make such things--so true and yet so
self-contradictory, so mutually repellent--clear to these simple-hearted
young correspondents of his? The more he thought of the matter, the more
he resolved to do nothing about it.

V

THE UNSATISFACTORINESS OF UNFRIENDLY CRITICISM

It was the experience of Eugenio that the criticisms of his books, when
they were unfriendly, presented a varying offence, rather than a
cumulative offence, as the years wore on. The criticisms of one's books
are always hard to bear if they are unfavorable, but he thought that
displeasure for displeasure the earlier refusal to allow him certain
merits was less displeasing than the later consent to take these merits
for granted. To be taken for granted in any wise is to be limited. It is
tantamount to having it said of one that, yes, one has those virtues,
but one has no others. It comes also to saying that one has, of course,
the defects of one's virtues; though Eugenio noted that, when certain
defects of his were taken for granted, it did not so distinctly and
immediately follow that he was supposed to have the virtues of these.

Now, Eugenio's theory of himself was that he was not limited, and that,
if he modestly stopped short of infinity, it was because he chose. He
had a feeling of always breaking new ground; and he did not like being
told that he was tilling the old glebe and harvesting the same crops, or
that in the little garden-ground where he let his fancy play he was
culling flowers of such familiar tint and scent that they seemed to be
the very flowers he had picked thirty or forty years before. What made
it harder to endure suggestion of this sort was that in his feeling of
always breaking new ground there was an inner sense, or fear, or doubt,
that perhaps it was not really virgin soil he was turning up, but merely
the sod of fields which had lain fallow a year or two or had possibly
been cropped the season before.

The misgiving was forced upon him by certain appearances in the work of
other veteran authors. When he took up the last book of some lifelong
favorite, no matter how great a master he knew him still to be, he