“How is it,” said the Sphinx one evening, “that you never bring a poem with you to dinner nowadays? Have you quite given up writing them?”
“I suppose,” said I, “it is a kind of laziness--but I hardly think it is voluntary, or much under my control. In many ways I grow more active and industrious as I grow older. I do more work and I work more regularly. The laziness is certainly neither mental nor physical. It is rather emotional--yes! a laziness of the emotional faculties.”
“You cannot mean that you have stopped falling in love?”
“I’m inclined to think I have,” I laughed; “but that, like the poetry, is only one expression of the laziness I mean. Generally, while, as I say, I am less lazy in doing than of old, and while, as doctors would say, my mental faculties are active and unimpaired, I grow more and more lazy in feeling.”
“Well, I mean that, while my brain grows year by year more catholic in its sympathies, and sees more clearly all the time opportunities of feeling old and new, my heart and senses seem less and less inclined to second it with any energy of enthusiasm or excitement. The beauty of the world, for example, never seemed more beautiful to me than it does now. I can see far more beauty in it than I could when I was a boy, appreciate far more its infinite variety; nor has it lost in wonder, or mystery or holiness. All this I see, and thankfully accept--but it is seldom that I am set in a fine glow, or that I fall into a dream about it. My appreciation of it is no longer rapture. Yes, I have lost rapture.”
“Poor old thing!” laughed the Sphinx derisively, “but go on.”
“Laugh,” said I, “but it’s all too true. Take another illustration: Some noble cause, some ghastly wrong, some agonising disaster. Never has my imagination been more alive to such appeals; never have they stirred me to greater aspiration, indignation or pity--mentally. But while my perceptive, imaginative side is thus more active than ever, it seems unable to set going the motive forces of feeling, as it used to do. It were as if I should say ‘Oh yes! indeed, I see it all--but I’ll feel about it to-morrow.’ Something underneath seems to say: ‘What is the use of being excited about it--of taking fire. It’s noble, it’s monstrous, it’s pitiful--but what’s the use!--feeling won’t help.’ To think how inspired, how savage, how wrought I should have been once--use or no use! But now....”