Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/91

 I say: approximately. For if all definitions are difficult in themselves, this becomes even more so when it is a question of describing a person who deviates greatly from the everyday norm. And no doubt this is the reason why novelists usually make their heroes devils or angels. Black or white is easy to paint, but far more difficult is the exact reproduction of the shades that lie between, when one is bound by the truth, and may therefore make the colours neither too dark nor too light. I feel that the sketch I have tried to give of Havelaar is entirely incomplete. The materials before me are so divergent in nature that by their excess of wealth they hamper my judgment; and probably, therefore, while unfolding the events I wish to relate, I shall revert to them for their completion. This is certain, he was an uncommon man, and well worth the trouble of studying. Already now I notice that I have neglected to give, as one of his principal traits, that he grasped the ludicrous and the serious side of things with the same rapidity and at the same time, from which characteristic his mode of speech derived, without his knowing it, a kind of humour, leaving his audience in continual doubt as to whether they had been struck by the deep feeling that animated his words, or whether they had to laugh about the absurdity which all of a sudden interrupted their earnestness.

It was remarkable that his appearance, and even his emotions, showed so few traces of the things he had gone through in his life. Boasting of one’s experience has become a ridiculous commonplace. There are people who for fifty or sixty years have drifted along with the little stream wherein they have pretended to swim, and who can tell little else of all this time than that they moved from the A-quay to the B-street. Nothing is of more usual occurrence than to hear people pride themselves on their experience, and especially those people who have obtained their white hair very easily. Others again think they may found their claims to experience on real vicissitudes undergone, although it does not appear from anything that those changes gripped them in their soul-life.