attacked them); he liked a little perhaps--it was a pardonable
weakness--to bewilder the youthful mind even while wishing to win it
over. My ingenuous sympathy received at any rate a shock from three
or four of his professions--he made me occasionally gasp and stare.
He couldn't help forgetting, or rather couldn't know, how little, in
another and drier clime, I had ever sat in the school in which he was
master; and he promoted me as at a jump to a sense of its penetralia.
My trepidations, however, were delightful; they were just what I had
hoped for, and their only fault was that they passed away too
quickly; since I found that for the main points I was essentially, I
was quite constitutionally, on Mark Ambient's "side." This was the
taken stand of the artist to whom every manifestation of human energy
was a thrilling spectacle and who felt for ever the desire to resolve
his experience of life into a literary form. On that high head of
the passion for form the attempt at perfection, the quest for which
was to his mind the real search for the holy grail--he said the most
interesting, the most inspiring things. He mixed with them a
thousand illustrations from his own life, from other lives he had
known, from history and fiction, and above all from the annals of the
time that was dear to him beyond all periods, the Italian cinque-
cento. It came to me thus that in his books he had uttered but half
his thought, and that what he had kept back from motives I deplored
when I made them out later--was the finer and braver part. It was
his fate to make a great many still more "prepared" people than me
not inconsiderably wince; but there was no grain of bravado in his
ripest things (I've always maintained it, though often contradicted),
and at bottom the poor fellow, disinterested to his finger-tips and
regarding imperfection not only as an aesthetic but quite also as a
social crime, had an extreme dread of scandal. There are critics who
regret that having gone so far he didn't go further; but I regret