Since then I have realized that I was more
clean cut, more Latin, and a great deal older than I had supposed.
"I see that you belong to the _ancient regime_," a Frenchwoman remarked
to me in Rome.
"I? Impossible!"
"Yes," she insisted. "You are a conversationalist. You are not an
elegant, sprucely dressed abbe; you are an abbe who is cynical and ill-
natured, who likes to fancy himself a savage amid the comfortable
surroundings of the drawing-room."
The Frenchwoman's observation set me to thinking.
Can it be that I am hovering in the vicinity of Apollo's Temple without
realizing it?
Possibly my literary life has been merely a journey from the Valley of
Dionysus to the Temple of Apollo. Now somebody will tell me that art
begins only on the bottom step of the Temple of Apollo. And it is true.
But there is where I stop--on the bottom step.
MELLOWNESS AND THE CRITICAL SENSE
Whenever my artistic conscience reproaches me, I always think: If I were
to undertake to write these books today, now that I am aware of their
defects, I should never write them. Nevertheless, I continue to write
others with the same old faults. Shall I ever attain that mellowness of
soul in which all the vividness of impression remains, yet in which it
has become possible to perfect the expression? I fear not.
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