the guitar; at the same time that it was always his personal experience
or his curious, his not a little defiantly excogitated, inner vision
that he sought to catch; some of the odd fashion of his play with which
latter seems on occasion to preponderate over the truly pleasing poet's
appeal to beauty or cultivated habit of grace. Odd enough, no doubt,
that Rupert should appear to have had well-nigh in horror the
cultivation of grace for its own sake, as we say, and yet should really
not have disfigured his poetic countenance by a single touch quotable as
showing this. The medal of the mere pleasant had always a reverse for
him, and it was generally in that substitute he was most interested. We
catch in him reaction upon reaction, the succession of these conducing
to his entirely unashamed poetic complexity, and of course one
observation always to be made about him, one reminder always to be
gratefully welcomed, is that we are dealing after all with one of the
_youngest_ quantities of art and character taken together that ever
arrived at an irresistible appeal. His irony, his liberty, his
pleasantry, his paradox, and what I have called his perversity, are all
nothing if not young; and I may as well say at once for him that I find
in the imagination of their turning in time, dreadful time, to something
more balanced and harmonised, a difficulty insuperable. The self-
consciousness, the poetic, of his so free figuration (in verse, only in
verse, oddly enough) of the unpleasant to behold, to touch, or even to
smell, was certainly, I think, nothing if not "self-conscious," but
there were so many things in his consciousness, which was never in the
least unpeopled, that it would have been a rare chance had his
projection of the self that we are so apt to make an object of invidious
allusion stayed out. What it all really most comes to, you feel again,
is that none of his impulses prospered in solitude, or, for that matter,
were so much as permitted to mumble their least scrap there; he was
predestined and condemned to sociability, which no league of neglect