the historians and the heroes?  Is it, then, in the nature of thought to become a crime in becoming public?  A thought, vulgar, critical, skeptical, dogmatic, may, according to you, be unvailed innocently:  a sentiment, commonplace, cold, not intimate, awaking no palpitation within you, no response in others, may be revealed without violation of modesty; but a thought that is pious, ardent, lighted at the fire of the heart or of heaven, a sentiment burning, cast forth by an explosion of the volcano of the soul; a cry of the inmost nature, awaking by its accent of truth young and sympathetic voices in the present age or the future:  and above all, a tear! a tear not painted like those which flow upon your shrouds of parade, a tear of water and salt, falling from the eyes, instead of a drop of ink, falling from the pen!  This is crime! this is shame! this is immodesty, for you!  That is to say, that whatever is cold and artificial is innocent in the artist, but what is warm and natural is unpardonable in the man.  That is to say, modesty in a writer consists in exposing what is false, immodesty in setting forth what is true.  If you have talent, show it, but not your soul, carrying mine away!  Oh, shame!  What logic!

But after all, you are right at bottom, only you do not know how to express it.  It is perfectly true that there are mysteries, nudities, parts of the soul not shameful but sensitive, depths, personalities, last foldings of thought and feeling, which would cost horribly to uncover, and which an honorable and natural scruple would never permit us to lay bare, without the remorse of violated modesty.  There is, I agree with you, such a thing as indiscretion of heart.  I felt this cruelly myself, the first time when, having written certain poetic dreams of my soul certain too real utterances of my sentiments, I read them to my most intimate friends.  My face was covered with blushes, and I could not finish.  I said to them:  “No, I cannot go farther; you shall read it.”  “And how is it,” answered my friends, “that you cannot read to us what you are about to give to all Europe to read?” “No,” I said, “I cannot tell why, but I feel no shame in letting the public read it, though I experience an invincible repugnance to reading it myself, face to face to only two or three of my friends.”

They did not understand me—­I did not understand myself.  We together exclaimed at the inconsistency of the human heart.  Since then I have felt the same instinctive repugnance at reading to a single person what cost me not a single effort of violated modesty to give to the public:  and after having long reflected on it, I find that this apparent inconsistency is at bottom only the perfect logic of our nature.