keep up the ingenuous self-reliance of youth: he finds himself under an
obligation to be skilled in various methods of seeming to know; and
having habitually expressed himself before he was convinced, his
interest in all subjects is chiefly to ascertain that he has not made a
mistake, and to feel his infallibility confirmed. That impulse to
decide, that vague sense of being able to achieve the unattempted, that
dream of aerial unlimited movement at will without feet or wings, which
were once but the joyous mounting of young sap, are already taking shape
as unalterable woody fibre: the impulse has hardened into "style," and
into a pattern of peremptory sentences; the sense of ability in the
presence of other men's failures is turning into the official arrogance
of one who habitually issues directions which he has never himself been
called on to execute; the dreamy buoyancy of the stripling has taken on
a fatal sort of reality in written pretensions which carry consequences.
He is on the way to become like the loud-buzzing, bouncing Bombus who
combines conceited illusions enough to supply several patients in a
lunatic asylum with the freedom to show himself at large in various
forms of print. If one who takes himself for the telegraphic centre of
all American wires is to be confined as unfit to transact affairs, what
shall we say to the man who believes himself in possession of the
unexpressed motives and designs dwelling in the breasts of all
sovereigns and all politicians? And I grieve to think that poor Pepin,
though less political, may by-and-by manifest a persuasion hardly more
sane, for he is beginning to explain people's writing by what he does
not know about them. Yet he was once at the comparatively innocent stage
which I have confessed to be that of my own early astonishment at my
powerful originality; and copying the just humility of the old Puritan,
I may say, "But for the grace of discouragement, this coxcombry might
have been mine."