ProvocationAbout a month later, Rowland addressed to his cousin Cecilia a letter of which the following is a portion:--...."So much for myself; yet I tell you but a tithe of my own story unless I let you know how matters stand with poor Hudson, for he gives me more to think about just now than anything else in the world.I need a good deal of courage to begin this chapter.
You warned me, you know, and I made rather light of your warning.
I have had all kinds of hopes and fears, but hitherto, in writing to you, I have resolutely put the hopes foremost.
Now, however, my pride has forsaken me, and I should like hugely to give expression to a little comfortable despair.I should like to say, 'My dear wise woman, you were right and I was wrong;you were a shrewd observer and I was a meddlesome donkey!'
When I think of a little talk we had about the 'salubrity of genius,'
I feel my ears tingle.If this is salubrity, give me raging disease!
I 'm pestered to death; I go about with a chronic heartache;there are moments when I could shed salt tears.There 's a pretty portrait of the most placid of men! I wish I could make you understand; or rather, I wish you could make me!
I don't understand a jot; it 's a hideous, mocking mystery;I give it up! I don't in the least give it up, you know;I 'm incapable of giving it up.I sit holding my head by the hour, racking my brain, wondering what under heaven is to be done.
You told me at Northampton that I took the thing too easily;you would tell me now, perhaps, that I take it too hard.
I do, altogether; but it can't be helped.Without flattering myself, I may say I 'm sympathetic.Many another man before this would have cast his perplexities to the winds and declared that Mr.Hudson must lie on his bed as he had made it.
Some men, perhaps, would even say that I am making a mighty ado about nothing; that I have only to give him rope, and he will tire himself out.But he tugs at his rope altogether too hard for me to hold it comfortably.
I certainly never pretended the thing was anything else than an experiment; I promised nothing, I answered for nothing;I only said the case was hopeful, and that it would be a shame to neglect it.I have done my best, and if the machine is running down I have a right to stand aside and let it scuttle.
Amen, amen! No, I can write that, but I can't feel it.
I can't be just; I can only be generous.I love the poor fellow and I can't give him up.As for understanding him, that 's another matter; nowadays I don't believe even you would.
One's wits are sadly pestered over here, I assure you, and I 'm in the way of seeing more than one puzzling specimen of human nature.Roderick and Miss Light, between them!....
Have n't I already told you about Miss Light? Last winter everything was perfection.Roderick struck out bravely, did really great things, and proved himself, as I supposed, thoroughly solid.He was strong, he was first-rate;I felt perfectly secure and sang private paeans of joy.
We had passed at a bound into the open sea, and left danger behind.
But in the summer I began to be puzzled, though I succeeded in not being alarmed.When we came back to Rome, however, I saw that the tide had turned and that we were close upon the rocks.
It is, in fact, another case of Ulysses alongside of the Sirens;only Roderick refuses to be tied to the mast.He is the most extraordinary being, the strangest mixture of qualities.
I don't understand so much force going with so much weakness--such a brilliant gift being subject to such lapses.
The poor fellow is incomplete, and it is really not his own fault; Nature has given him the faculty out of hand and bidden him be hanged with it.I never knew a man harder to advise or assist, if he is not in the mood for listening.
I suppose there is some key or other to his character, but I try in vain to find it; and yet I can't believe that Providence is so cruel as to have turned the lock and thrown the key away.He perplexes me, as I say, to death, and though he tires out my patience, he still fascinates me.
Sometimes I think he has n't a grain of conscience, and sometimes I think that, in a way, he has an excess.
He takes things at once too easily and too hard; he is both too lax and too tense, too reckless and too ambitious, too cold and too passionate.He has developed faster even than you prophesied, and for good and evil alike he takes up a formidable space.There 's too much of him for me, at any rate.Yes, he is hard; there is no mistake about that.
He 's inflexible, he 's brittle; and though he has plenty of spirit, plenty of soul, he has n't what I call a heart.
He has something that Miss Garland took for one, and I 'm pretty sure she 's a judge.But she judged on scanty evidence.
He has something that Christina Light, here, makes believe at times that she takes for one, but she is no judge at all!
I think it is established that, in the long run, egotism makes a failure in conduct: is it also true that it makes a failure in the arts?....Roderick's standard is immensely high;I must do him that justice.He will do nothing beneath it, and while he is waiting for inspiration, his imagination, his nerves, his senses must have something to amuse them.
This is a highly philosophical way of saying that he has taken to dissipation, and that he has just been spending a month at Naples--a city where 'pleasure' is actively cultivated--in very bad company.Are they all like that, all the men of genius?
There are a great many artists here who hammer away at their trade with exemplary industry; in fact I am surprised at their success in reducing the matter to a steady, daily grind: but I really don't think that one of them has his exquisite quality of talent.
It is in the matter of quantity that he has broken down.
The bottle won't pour; he turns it upside down; it 's no use!
Sometimes he declares it 's empty--that he has done all he was made to do.This I consider great nonsense; but I would nevertheless take him on his own terms if it was only I that was concerned.
