and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too
blunt for his purpose--as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent
emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to snivelling and
giggles.

These may seem selfish considerations; but you can't, in sound morals,
condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear
duty. And least of all you can condemn an artist pursuing, however
humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where
his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined
adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance
or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say
Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?

And besides--this, remember, is the place and the moment of perfectly
open talk--I think that all ambitions are lawful except those
which climb upwards on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All
intellectual and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and even
beyond the limit of prudent sanity. They can hurt no one. If they are
mad, then so much the worse for the artist. Indeed, as virtue is said
to be, such ambitions are their own reward. Is it such a very mad
presumption to believe in the sovereign power of one's art, to try
for other means, for other ways of affirming this belief in the deeper
appeal of one's work? To try to go deeper is not to be insensible. An
historian of hearts is not an historian of emotions, yet he penetrates
further, restrained as he may be, since his aim is to reach the very
fount of laughter and tears. The sight of human affairs deserves
admiration and pity. They are worthy of respect too. And he is not
insensible who pays them the undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is
not a sob, and of a smile which is not a grin. Resignation, not mystic,