Читать книгу Set Down in Malice: A Book of Reminiscences онлайн

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Don’t say you like what I wrote in The Daily Sketch; all my best things were carefully cut out and filled up with drivel, till my cheeks burned.

Your sketch of me is very kindly; the fault you find in me is not a fault. Jesus, Shakespeare, Napoleon—all the ssss1 greatest men have known their own value and insisted on it—perhaps because they have all come to their own and their own received them not. When you have done great work you feel it is not yours, but given to you; you are only a reed shaken in the wind; you can judge it as if it had nothing to do with you. Moreover, you see that this failure to recognise greatness is the capital sin of all time, the sin against the Holy Ghost which He said could never be forgiven. Modesty is the fig-leaf of mediocrity—don’t let us talk of it. Remember how Whistler scourged it.

I’m writing now on Natural Religion—my best thing yet: I’ve done more than Nietzsche: don’t think I’m bragging. I am the Reconciler; though my cocked nose and keen eyes may make you think me a combatant. Twenty years hence, Cumberland, if your eyes keep their promise, you’ll think differently of me. I remember as a young man getting Wagner to praise himself and saying to myself that no man was ever so conceited as the little hawk-faced fellow with the ploughshare chin. Did he not say that the step from Bach to Beethoven was not so great as that from Beethoven to Wagner! And yet for these fifteen years past I have agreed with him and find nothing conceited in the declaration. Only weak men are hurt by another man’s conceit; are we not gods also to be spoken of with reverence?