"Conrad, Joseph - A Personal Record" - читать интересную книгу автора (Conrad Joseph)

have all heard of simple men selling their souls for love or
power to some grotesque devil. The most ordinary intelligence
can perceive without much reflection that anything of the sort is
bound to be a fool's bargain. I don't lay claim to particular
wisdom because of my dislike and distrust of such transactions.
It may be my sea training acting upon a natural disposition to
keep good hold on the one thing really mine, but the fact is that
I have a positive horror of losing even for one moving moment
that full possession of my self which is the first condition of
good service. And I have carried my notion of good service from
my earlier into my later existence. I, who have never sought in
the written word anything else but a form of the Beautiful--I
have carried over that article of creed from the decks of ships
to the more circumscribed space of my desk, and by that act, I
suppose, I have become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the
ineffable company of pure esthetes.

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for
himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and by the
consistent narrowness of his outlook. But I have never been able
to love what was not lovable or hate what was not hateful out of
deference for some general principle. Whether there be any
courage in making this admission I know not. After the middle
turn of life's way we consider dangers and joys with a tranquil
mind. So I proceed in peace to declare that I have always
suspected in the effort to bring into play the extremities of
emotions the debasing touch of insincerity. In order to move
others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried
away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility--innocently
enough, perhaps, and of necessity, like an actor who raises his
voice on the stage above the pitch of natural conversation--but
still we have to do that. And surely this is no great sin. But
the danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own
exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the
end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too
blunt for his purpose--as, in fact, not good enough for his
insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy
to snivelling and giggles.

These may seem selfish considerations; but you can't, in sound
morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It
is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist
pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In
that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking
for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no
policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of
opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay
to his temptations if not his conscience?

And besides--this, remember, is the place and the moment of