be simple, he could not be spontaneous; he was tormented by
self-consciousness; and it was impossible to him to talk and behave
as those talk and behave who have been brought up more or less in
the big world from the beginning. So this dream too faded, for
youth asks before all things simplicity and spontaneity in those
who would take possession of it. His lectures, which were at first
brilliant enough to attract numbers of men from other colleges,
became gradually mere dry, ingenious skeletons, without life or
feeling. It was possible to learn a great deal from him; it was
not possible to catch from him any contagion of that _amor
intellectualis_ which had flamed at one moment so high within him.
He ceased to compose; but as the intellectual faculty must have
some employment, he became a translator, a contributor to dictionaries,
a microscopic student of texts, not in the interest of anything
beyond, but simply as a kind of mental stone-breaking.

The only survival of that moment of glow and color in his life was
his love of music and the theatre. Almost every year he disappeared
to France to haunt the Paris theatres for a fortnight; to Berlin
or Bayreuth to drink his fill of music. He talked neither of music
nor of acting; he made no one sharer of his enjoyment, if he did
enjoy. It was simply his way of cheating his creative faculty,
which, though it had grown impotent, was still there, still restless.
Altogether a melancholy, pitiable man--at once thorough-going
sceptic and thorough-going idealist, the victim of that critical
sense which says 'No' to every impulse, and is always restlessly
and yet hopelessly, seeking the future through the neglected and
outraged present.

And yet the man's instincts, at this period of his life at any rate,