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. Or he may have allowed the easy impulse of exaggeration to
force a sentence which the mere truth, sensitively and powerfully
pausing, would well have become. Exaggeration has played a part of its
own in human history. By depreciating our language it has stimulated
change, and has kept the circulating word in exercise. Our rejection
must be alert and expert to overtake exaggeration and arrest it. It
makes us shrewder than we wish to be. And, indeed, the whole endless
action of refusal shortens the life we could desire to live. Much of our
resolution is used up in the repeated mental gesture of adverse decision.
Our tacit and implicit distaste is made explicit, who shall say with what
loss to our treasury of quietness? We are defrauded of our interior
ignorance, which should be a place of peace. We are forced to confess
more articulately than befits our convention with ourselves. We are
hurried out of our reluctances. We are made too much aware. Nay, more:
we are tempted to the outward activity of destruction; reviewing becomes
almost inevitable. As for the spiritual life--O weary, weary act of
refusal! O waste but necessary hours, vigil and wakefulness of fear! 'We
live by admiration' only a shortened life who live so much in the
iteration of rejection and repulse. And in the very touch of joy there
hides I know not what ultimate denial; if not on one side, on the other.
If joy is given to us without reserve, not so do we give ourselves to