know it is true, and you will know it yourself some day. And if you cannot release your personality, what you write, though it be engraved in letters an inch deep on stones weighing many tons, will lie like snow in the street to be melted away by the first rain.
We talked of other writers. Peter drew my attention, for instance, to the work of Cunninghame Graham, that strange Scotch mystic who turned his back on civilization to write of the pampas, the arid plains of Africa, India, and Spain, only to find irony everywhere in every work of man. But, observed Peter, he could not hate civilization so intensely had he not lived in it. It is all very well to kick over the ladder after you have climbed it and set foot on the balcony. Like all lovers of the simple life, he is very complex. And we discussed James Branch Cabell, who, Peter told me, was originally a "romantic." He wrote of knights and ladyes and palfreys with sympathetic picturesqueness. Of late, however, continued Peter, he, too, seems to have turned over in bed. Romanticism still appears in his work but it is undermined by a biting and disturbing irony. He asks: Are any of the manifestations of modern civilization worthy of admiration? and like Graham, he seems to answer, No. It is possible that the public disregard for his earlier and simpler manner may have produced this metamorphosis. Many a man has become bitter with less reason. Then he spoke of the attributed influence
