Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/111

Rh moments of conversation, it gives pause. Distinctly, it gives pause. I have never held it an excuse for anything in art or literature that one should turn upon a public about to scoff, to be offended, to be frightened, and announce that "it is true": that the incident in either a picture or a story should be "true" is not a sufficient excuse for the painting or the telling of it. But when I insist courteously to readers of certain religious convictions that I am not "making up" either my scenes, my characters, or what, for want of a better name, shall be called my story, I am only desirous that they shall absolve me from any desire to be irreverent and to shock their feelings. They might remember that what is reverent to them may not be so to me; but I do not hope to secure so great a concession by any means. What I would finally point out is that the irreverence goes back further than the mere writing down of the story; they must accuse a greater than I if they object to the facts of the case—they must state their quarrel to the controlling power which designed poor Wladislaw's physiognomy: to use some of the phrases beloved of the very class I am entreating, I would suggest that the boy did not "make himself"; he was "sent into the world" like that. I daresay considering what I am going to relate—I daresay he wished he had not been; he was so very shy a fellow, and it led to his being a great deal observed and commented upon. What encouraged me to feel at home with him in spite of his appearance was the real youngness of his nature. He was extraordinarily simple and well, fluffy. For he really suggested a newly-hatched chicken to me; bits of the eggshell were still clinging to his yellow down, if I may hint at the metaphor.

His cleverness was tremendously in advance of his training and his executive powers. Some day, one could see, he was going to paint marvellously, if he would wait and survive his failures and