Chapter 8 - Page 2

n't I already told you about Miss Light? Last winter everything was
perfection. Roderick struck out bravely, did really great things, and
proved himself, as I supposed, thoroughly solid. He was strong, he was
first-rate; I felt perfectly secure and sang private paeans of joy. We
had passed at a bound into the open sea, and left danger behind. But
in the summer I began to be puzzled, though I succeeded in not being
alarmed. When we came back to Rome, however, I saw that the tide had
turned and that we were close upon the rocks. It is, in fact, another
case of Ulysses alongside of the Sirens; only Roderick refuses to be
tied to the mast. He is the most extraordinary being, the strangest
mixture of qualities. I don't understand so much force going with so
much weakness--such a brilliant gift being subject to such lapses. The
poor fellow is incomplete, and it is really not his own fault; Nature
has given him the faculty out of hand and bidden him be hanged with it.
I never knew a man harder to advise or assist, if he is not in the mood
for listening. I suppose there is some key or other to his character,
but I try in vain to find it; and yet I can't believe that Providence
is so cruel as to have turned the lock and thrown the key away. He
perplexes me, as I say, to death, and though he tires out my patience,
he still fascinates me. Sometimes I think he has n't a grain of
conscience, and sometimes I think that, in a way, he has an excess. He
takes things at once too easily and too hard; he is both too lax and too
tense, too reckless and too ambitious, too cold and too passionate. He
has developed faster even than you prophesied, and for good and evil
alike he takes up a formidable space. There 's too much of him for me,
at any rate. Yes, he is hard; there is no mistake about that. He 's
inflexible, he 's brittle; and though he has plenty of spirit, plenty of
soul, he has n't what I call a heart. He has something that Miss Garland
took for one, and I 'm pretty sure she 's a judge. But she judged on
scanty evidence. He has something that Christina Light, here, makes
believe at times that she takes for one, but she is no judge at all! I
think it is established that, in the long run, egotism makes a failure
in conduct: is it also true that it makes a failure in the arts?...
Roderick's standard is immensely high; I must do him that justice. He
will do nothing beneath it, and while he is waiting for inspiration, his
imagination, his nerves, his senses must have something to amuse them.
This is a highly philosophical way of saying that he has taken to
dissipation, and that he has just been spending a month at Naples--a
city where 'pleasure' is actively cultivated--in very bad company.
Are they all like that, all the men of