Nothing more
humiliating! And this for the reason that should the mark be missed,
should the open display of emotion fail to move, then it must perish
unavoidably in disgust or contempt. No artist can be reproached for
shrinking from a risk which only fools run to meet and only genius dare
confront with impunity. In a task which mainly consists in laying one's
soul more or less bare to the world, a regard for decency, even at
the cost of success, is but the regard for one's own dignity which is
inseparably united with the dignity of one's work.
And then--it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this
earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of
pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity
for suffering which makes man August in the eyes of men) have their
source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling com passion
as the common inheritance of us all. Joy and sorrow in this world pass
into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight
of life as mysterious as an over shadowed ocean, while the dazzling
brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the
distant edge of the horizon.
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