lightning of wrath. The reader will go on reading if the book pleases
him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of
detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and which is
yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods.

It is only when the catastrophe matches the natural obscurity of our
fate that even the best representative of the race is liable to lose his
detachment. It is very obvious that on the arrival of the gentlemanly
Mr. Jones, the single-minded Ricardo, and the faithful Pedro, Heyst, the
man of universal detachment, loses his mental self-possession, that fine
attitude before the universally irremediable which wears the name of
stoicism. It is all a matter of proportion. There should have been a
remedy for that sort of thing. And yet there is no remedy. Behind this
minute instance of life's hazards Heyst sees the power of blind destiny.
Besides, Heyst in his fine detachment had lost the habit asserting
himself. I don't mean the courage of self-assertion, either moral or
physical, but the mere way of it, the trick of the thing, the readiness
of mind and the turn of the hand that come without reflection and lead
the man to excellence in life, in art, in crime, in virtue, and, for the
matter of that, even in love. Thinking is the great enemy of perfection.
The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most
pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man.

But I wouldn't be suspected even remotely of making fun of Axel Heyst. I
have always liked him. The flesh-and-blood individual who stands
behind the infinitely more familiar figure of the book I remember as a
mysterious Swede right enough. Whether he was a baron, too, I am not so
certain. He himself never laid claim to that distinction. His detachment
was too great to make any claims, big or small, on one's credulity. I
will not say where I met him because I fear to give my readers a