It's nearly yours, but not quite. It's an
improvement on Anna's, whose eyes now are exactly yours. Eva's,
unfortunately, are not so faithful. I'm afraid we'll have to try again.'
"No, but seriously," he once more began, "for a really vital and
successful life there is no adequate employment of the faculties after
thirty, except, of course, in the repetition of former successes. No; I
even withdraw that,--not the repetition, only the conservation, the
feeding, of former successes. The success is in the creation. When a
world is once created, any fool can keep it spinning.
"Man's life is at least thirty years too long. Two score years is more
than enough for us to say what we were sent here to say; and if you'll
consider those biographies in which you are most interested, the
biographies of great writers, you cannot but bear me out. What, for
instance, did Keats and Shelley and Burns and Byron lose by dying, all
of them long before they were forty,--Keats even long before he was
thirty; and what did Wordsworth and Coleridge gain by living so long
after? Wordsworth and Coleridge didn't even live to repeat themselves,
else, of course, one would have begged them to go on living for ever;
for some repetitions, it is admitted, are welcome,--for instance, won't
you have a little more whisky?"
Henry always agreed so completely with Gerard's talk, or at least so
delighted in it, that he had little scope of opportunity to say much
himself; and Gerard was too keen a talker to complain of a rapt
young listener.
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