learnedly and slowly. The roots of his antithetical dream were
visible enough: a never idle man of great physical strength and
extremely irascible--did he not fling a badly baked plum pudding
through the window upon Xmas Day?--a man more joyous than any
intellectual man of our world, called himself 'the idle singer of
an empty day' created new forms of melancholy, and faint persons,
like the knights & ladies of Burne Jones, who are never, no, not
once in forty volumes, put out of temper. A blunderer, who had
said to the only unconverted man at a socialist picnic in Dublin,
to prove that equality came easy, 'I was brought up a gentleman
and now, as you can see, associate with all sorts,' and left
wounds thereby that rankled after twenty years, a man of whom I
have heard it said 'He is always afraid that he is doing something
wrong, and generally is,' wrote long stories with apparently no
other object than that his persons might show one another, through
situations of poignant difficulty, the most exquisite tact.

He did not project, like Henley or like Wilde, an image of
himself, because, having all his imagination set on making and
doing, he had little self-knowledge. He imagined instead new
conditions of making and doing; and, in the teeth of those
scientific generalisations that cowed my boyhood, I can see some
like imagining in every great change, believing that the first
flying fish leaped, not because it sought 'adaptation' to the air,
but out of horror of the sea.




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