"I should like to know what you want this for; however, happily, I have put it in a form you can't make much use of."
I was much amused at the way in which he treated gossip about himself.
I told him some stories about him that I had picked up. They related to a certain absent-mindedness which he was supposed to possess.
"I am afraid they are not true," he said first. "I should welcome any hint of absence of mind in myself as a sign that the abstract could exclude the concrete, which is unfortunately not the case with me." Then, in a moment, he said, "People have no business to tell such stories. I should not mind their not being true, if they were only characteristic."
"By which you mean," said a gentleman who was sitting next him, "that you don't care about veracity, only you can't stand dullness."
"Not at all," said Arthur, quickly. "Veracity is not the question in gossip at all. It is all hearsay. You have not to judge of the actual truth of a scandalous story, but you have to judge of the probable truth of it, and if it is obviously uncharacteristic it is wrong to repeat it. It becomes scandal then, and not till then."
When he was living in London, which was, for the time being, his home, he lived a regular life, combining more reading with a sociable life than many people would have thought possible. He had two rooms in a house in Russell Square. He breakfasted at half-past nine and read till four, when he went down to his club and talked, or strolled in the park. He made hardly any engagements, except for the evening; and admitted hardly anyone, except two or three friends, to see him at his rooms, and then only after one o'clock, before which hour he was absolutely invisible. He was so dreadfully angry with his landlady for showing a gentleman in once in the middle of the morning, that she literally refused ever to do it again. "He's a good regular lodger, sir, and doesn't think of money, but he said to me, 'Mrs. Laing, I don't choose to be disturbed before one. If I find my orders disregarded again, I shall leave the house that day.' I daren't do it, sir. You wouldn't like to deprive me of my lodger, I know, sir." The last pathetic plea could not be gainsaid, so Arthur had his way.
Four evenings he devoted to going out, and the other three dining quietly at home and reading. By the time he left London his reading, always wide, had become prodigious. His own library was good, and he had a ticket for the British Museum Reading-room and belonged to two circulating libraries. He made a point of reading new books (1) if he was strongly recommended them by specialists; (2) if they reached a second edition within a month; (3) if they were republished after a period of neglect—this he held to be the best test of a book.
It was characteristic of his natural indolence that he chose the very easiest method of reading—that is to say, he always read, if he could, in a translation, or if the style of the original was the object, with one. This, like his posture, nearly recumbent, was deliberately adopted. "I find," he said, "that the reflective part of my brain works best when I have as little either bodily or purely intellectual to distract me as possible. And it is the reflective part," he says, "that I always preferred to cultivate, and that latterly I have devoted my whole attention to. It is through the reflective part that one gets the highest influence over people. Training the reflective function is the training of character, while the training of the purely physical side often, and the training of the intellectual side not uncommonly, have a distinctly deteriorative effect.