Therefore I bind Innocence and
Experience in one, and take them as a sign of the necessary and noble
isolation of man from man--of his uniqueness. But if I had a mind to
forego that manner of personal separateness, and to use the things of
others, I think I would rather appropriate their future than their past.
Let me put on their hopes, and the colours of their confidence, if I must
borrow. Not that I would burden my prophetic soul with unjustified
ambitions; but even this would be more tolerable than to load my memory
with an unjustifiable history.
And yet how differently do the writers of a certain kind of love-poetry
consider this matter. These are the love-poets who have no reluctance in
adopting the past of a multitude of people to whom they have not even
been introduced. Their verse is full of ready-made memories, various,
numerous, and cruel. No single life--supposing it to be a liberal life
concerned with something besides sex--could quite suffice for so much
experience, so much disillusion, so much _deception_. To achieve that
tone in its fulness it is necessary to take for one's own the
_praeterita_ (say) of Alfred de Musset and of the men who helped him--not
to live but--to have lived; it is necessary to have lived much more than
any man lives, and to make a common hoard of erotic remembrances with all
kinds of poets.
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