But how could Eugenio make such things--so true and yet so self-contradictory, so mutually repellent--clear to these simple-hearted young correspondents of his? The more he thought of the matter, the more he resolved to do nothing about it.
THE UNSATISFACTORINESS OF UNFRIENDLY CRITICISM
It was the experience of Eugenio that the criticisms of his books, when they were unfriendly, presented a varying offence, rather than a cumulative offence, as the years wore on. The criticisms of one's books are always hard to bear if they are unfavorable, but he thought that displeasure for displeasure the earlier refusal to allow him certain merits was less displeasing than the later consent to take these merits for granted. To be taken for granted in any wise is to be limited. It is tantamount to having it said of one that, yes, one has those virtues, but one has no others. It comes also to saying that one has, of course, the defects of one's virtues; though Eugenio noted that, when certain defects of his were taken for granted, it did not so distinctly and immediately follow that he was supposed to have the virtues of these.
Now, Eugenio's theory of himself was that he was not limited, and that, if he modestly stopped short of infinity, it was because he chose. He had a feeling of always breaking new ground; and he did not like being told that he was tilling the old glebe and harvesting the same crops, or that in the little garden-ground where he let his fancy play he was culling flowers of such familiar tint and scent that they seemed to be the very flowers he had picked thirty or forty years before. What made it harder to endure suggestion of this sort was that in his feeling of always breaking new ground there was an inner sense, or fear, or doubt, that perhaps it was not really virgin soil he was turning up, but merely the sod of fields which had lain fallow a year or two or had possibly been cropped the season before.
The misgiving was forced upon him by certain appearances in the work of other veteran authors. When he took up the last book of some lifelong favorite, no matter how great a master he knew him still to be, he could not help seeing that the poor old master was repeating himself, though he would not have phrased the case in such brutal terms. Then the chill wonder how long he could hope to escape the like fate pierced him, and for a moment he could not silence the question whether it might not have already befallen him. In another moment he knew better, and was justly aggrieved with the next reviewer who took things in him for granted, quite as offensively if they were merits as if they were defects. It was vital to him to be always breaking new ground, and, if at times it seemed to him that he had turned this or that furrow before, he said to himself that it was merely one of those intimations of pre-existence which are always teasing us here with the sense of experience in circumstances absolutely novel; and he hoped that no one else would notice the coincidence.