For He Mixes Up
Unanswerable Things With False Conclusions, He Is Perpetually Letting
The Cat Out Of The Bag And Exposing Our Tricks, Putting A Colour To
Our Actions, Disturbing Us With Our Own Memory, Indecently Revealing
Corners Of The Soul.
He is like those men who say one unpleasant and
rude thing about a friend, and then take refuge
From their disloyal
and false action by pleading that this single accusation is true; and
it is perhaps for this abominable logicality of his and for his
malicious cunning that I chiefly hate him: and since he himself
evidently hated the human race, he must not complain if he is hated in
return.
Take, for instance, this phrase that set me writing, _'Ce nest que le
premier pas qui coute'_. It is false. Much after a beginning is
difficult, as everybody knows who has crossed the sea, and as for the
first _step_ a man never so much as remembers it; if there is
difficulty it is in the whole launching of a thing, in the first ten
pages of a book, or the first half-hour of listening to a sermon, or
the first mile of a walk. The first step is undertaken lightly,
pleasantly, and with your soul in the sky; it is the five-hundredth
that counts. But I know, and you know, and he knew (worse luck) that
he was saying a thorny and catching thing when he made up that phrase.
It worries one of set purpose.
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