of undeniable gifts fail of commensurate production) but a cause
purely intellectual--the presence in him, namely, of a certain vein
of opinion; that other, constituent but contending, person, in his
complex nature. "The relation of thought to action," he writes,
"filled my mind on waking, and I found myself carried towards a
bizarre formula, which seems to have something of the night still
clinging about it. Action is but coarsened thought." That is but an
ingenious metaphysical point, as he goes on to show. But, including
in "action" that literary production in which the line of his own
proper activity lay, he followed--followed often--that fastidious
utterance to a cynical and pessimistic conclusion.

Maia, as he calls it, the empty "Absolute" of the Buddhist, the
"Infinite," the "All," of which those German metaphysicians he loved
only too well have had so much to say: this was for ever to give the
go-by to all positive, finite, limited interests whatever. The vague
pretensions of an abstract expression acted on him with all the force
of a prejudice. "The ideal," he admits, [32] "poisons for me all
imperfect possession"; and again, "The Buddhist tendency in me blunts
the faculty of free self-government, and weakens the power of action.
I feel a terror of action and am only at ease in the impersonal,
disinterested, and objective line of thought." But then, again, with
him "action" meant chiefly literary production. He quotes with
approval those admirable words from Goethe, "In der Beschrankung
zeigt sich erst der Meister"; yet still always finds himself wavering
between "frittering myself away on the infinitely little, and longing
after what is unknown and distant." There is, doubtless, over and
above the physical consumptive tendency, an instinctive turn of
sentiment in this touching confession. Still, what strengthened both
tendencies was that metaphysical prejudice for the "Absolute," the