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. It is as though one had a voice inside
one saying:
'I know you, you will never begin anything. Look at what you might
have done! Here you are, already twenty-one, and you have not yet
written a dictionary. What will you do for fame? Eh? Nothing: you are
intolerably lazy - and what is worse, it is your fate. Beginnings are
insuperable barriers to you. What about that great work on The
National Debt? What about that little lyric on Winchelsea that you
thought of writing six years ago? Why are the few lines still in your
head and not on paper? Because you can't begin. However, never mind,
you can't help it, it's your one great flaw, and it's fatal. Look at
Jones! Younger than you by half a year, and already on the _Evening
Yankee_ taking bribes from Company Promoters! And where are you?' &c.,
&c. - and so forth.
So this threat about the heavy task of Beginning breeds
discouragement, anger, vexation, irritability, bad style, pomposity
and infinitives split from helm to saddle, and metaphors as mixed as
the Carlton. But it is just true enough to remain fast in the mind,
caught, as it were, by one finger. For all things (you will notice)
are very difficult in their origin, and why, no one can understand.
_Omne Trinum_: they are difficult also in the shock of maturity and in
their ending. Take, for instance, the Life of Man, which is the
Difficulty of Birth, the Difficulty of Death, and the Difficulty of
the Grand Climacteric.
LECTOR. What is the Grand Climacteric?
AUCTOR. I have no time to tell you, for it would lead us into a
discussion on Astrology, and then perhaps to a question of physical
science, and then you would find I was not orthodox, and perhaps
denounce me to the authorities.
I will tell you this much; it is the moment (not the year or the
month, mind you, nor even the hour, but the very second) when a man is
grown up, when he sees things as they are (that is, backwards), and
feels solidly himself.
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