reading. And for this he has had exceptional opportunities. Always a
man of wealth and leisure, he has never wasted himself in that
superficial observation which is often the only harvest of foreign
travel. He despises it, and in relation to travellers, is wont to
quote the famous parallel of the copper wire, 'which grows the
narrower by going further.' A confirmed stay-at-home, he has mingled
much in society of all sorts, and exercised a keen but quite
unsympathetic observation. His very reserve in company (though, when
he catches you alone, he is a button-holder of great tenacity)
encourages free speech in others; they have no more reticence in his
presence than if he were the butler. He has belonged to no cliques,
and thereby escaped the greatest peril which can beset the student of
human nature. A man of genius, indeed, in these days is almost
certain, sooner or later, to become the centre of a mutual admiration
society; but the person I have in my mind is no genius, nor anything
like one, and he thanks Heaven for it. To an opinion of his own he
does not pretend, but his views upon the opinions of other people he
believes to be infallible. I have called him dogmatic, but that does
not at all express the absolute certainty with which he delivers
judgment. 'I know no more,' he says, 'about the problems of human life
than you do' (taking me as an illustration of the lowest prevailing
ignorance), 'but I know what everybody is thinking about them.' He is
didactic, and therefore often dull, and will eventually, no doubt,
become one of the greatest bores in Great Britain. At present,
however, he is worth knowing; and I propose to myself to be his
Boswell, and to introduce him--or, at least, his views--to other
people. I have entitled them the Midway Inn, partly from my own
inveterate habit of story-telling, but chiefly from an image of his
own, by which he once described to me, in his fine egotistic rolling
style, the position he seemed to himself to occupy in the world.