Competent learning, general
cultivation, absolute probity, accuracy of general view, human sympathy
and technical capacity--how many things are necessary to the critic,
without reckoning grace, delicacy, _savoir vivre_, and the gift of happy
phrase-making!
July 26, 1878.--Every morning I wake up with the same sense of vain
struggle against a mountain tide which is about to overwhelm me. I shall
die by suffocation, and the suffocation has begun; the progress it has
already made stimulates it to go on.
How can one make any plans when every day brings with it some fresh
misery? I cannot even decide on a line of action in a situation so full
of confusion and uncertainty in which I look forward to the worst, while
yet all is doubtful. Have I still a few years before me or only a few
months? Will death be slow or will it come upon me as a sudden
catastrophe? How am I to bear the days as they come? how am I to fill
them? How am I to die with calmness and dignity? I know not. Everything
I do for the first time I do badly; but here everything is new; there
can be no help from experience; the end must be a chance! How mortifying
for one who has set so great a price upon independence--to depend upon a
thousand unforeseen contingencies! He knows not how he will act or what
he will become; he would fain speak of these things with a friend of
good sense and good counsel--but who? He dares not alarm the affections
which are most his own, and he is almost sure that any others would try
to distract his attention, and would refuse to see the position as it
is.
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