But
the gay injustice of laughter is between me and the book.
That narrow house--there is sometimes a message from its living windows.
Its bewilderment, its reluctance, its defect, show by moments from eyes
that are apt to express none but common things. There are allusions
unawares, involuntary appeals, in those brief glances. Far from me and
from my friends be the misfortune of meeting such looks in reply to pain
of our inflicting. To be clever and sensitive and to hurt the foolish
and the stolid--wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world? Not I, by
this heavenly light.
REJECTION
Simplicity is not virginal in the modern world. She has a penitential or
a vidual singleness. We can conceive an antique world in which life,
art, and letters were simple because of the absence of many things; for
us now they can be simple only because of our rejection of many things.
We are constrained to such a vigilance as will not let even a master's
work pass unfanned and unpurged. Even among his phrases one shall be
taken and the other left. For he may unawares have allowed the
habitualness that besets this multitudinous life to take the pen from his
hand and to write for him a page or a word; and habitualness compels our
refusals.
Pages:
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73