My answer is that if it be true that every novel contains an element of autobiography—­and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can only express himself in his creation—­then there are some of us to whom an open display of sentiment is repugnant.  I would not unduly praise the virtue of restraint.  It is often merely temperamental.  But it is not always a sign of coldness.  It may be pride.  There can be nothing more humiliating than to see the shaft of one’s emotion miss the mark either of laughter or tears.  Nothing more humiliating!  And this for the reason that should the mark be missed, should the open display of emotion fail to move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust or contempt.  No artist can be reproached for shrinking from a risk which only fools run to meet and only genius dare confront with impunity.  In a task which mainly consists in laying one’s soul more or less bare to the world, a regard for decency, even at the cost of success, is but the regard for one’s own dignity which is inseparably united with the dignity of one’s work.

And then—­it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth.  The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity for suffering which makes man august in the eyes of men) have their source in weaknesses which must be recognised with smiling compassion as the common inheritance of us all.  Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon.

Yes!  I too would like to hold the magic wand giving that command over laughter and tears which is declared to be the highest achievement of imaginative literature.  Only, to be a great magician one must surrender oneself to occult and irresponsible powers, either outside or within one’s own breast.  We have all heard of simple men selling their souls for love or power to some grotesque devil.  The most ordinary intelligence can perceive without much reflection that anything of the sort is bound to be a fool’s bargain.  I don’t lay claim to particular wisdom because of my dislike and distrust of such transactions.  It may be my sea-training acting upon a natural disposition to keep good hold on the one thing really mine, but the fact is that I have a positive horror of losing even for one moving moment that full possession of myself which is the first condition of good service.  And I have carried my notion of good service from my earlier into my later existence.  I, who have never sought in the written word anything else but a form of the Beautiful, I have carried over that article of creed from the decks of ships to the more circumscribed space of my desk; and by that act, I suppose, I have become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the ineffable company of pure esthetes.