Late into the lone night, and sing wild songs
Of maids deserted in the olden time.
He thus deceives every one but himself, and that one exception is the real cause of his unhappiness. He cannot avoid his affectations. He only finds them out when they are full-grown and most noisily and hungrily abroad in every man's ears, and then he has to maintain them, wearily but with an apparent gaiety. Pity even will not hurt him. It is his genial air: he rejoices in it as a pigeon, leaning and raising her wing to expose her tender side, rejoices in summer rain, and as languidly; and then again he is furious at it, and cultivates brutality, drinks much beer, and uses many oaths, of which he wearies and comes again to the old tap.
The ghosts of the subtle emotions which we say make up modernity have come into his brain, and they are so many that he has become, if not a theatre, at least a mortuary, of modernity. But the nervous strain of any real passion in his neighbourhood obliges him to be rude or to run away. Real passion was always scandalously ill done: he would have no lover die less romantically than Romeo.
And as his thoughts, so are his acts, except that they are few. He has been to Rome, the Bay of Spezzia, Windermere; he has walked along the Pilgrim's Road to Canterbury. He has learned to work badly in metal and wood. He has had whims and drugs enough to win an appreciation from Mr. Arthur Symons. He has written poems under the influence of something in his stomach; but either he cannot read them, or they are not fit to be read. He wrote one, I remember, about a girl who worked a story in tapestry while her lover played on a harp the melody which told the same story. He wrote a sermon on the death of John Jones because a hundred persons of that name die every day, and he wished to praise the average man, out of a whimsical distaste for his late less fantastic likings. He has had friends and has been left by them; or, as he says, after the Welsh poet,
The brave, the magnanimous, the amiable, the generous, and the energetic
Are as stepping-stones to the bard.
He has made love, and he has been scorned; the sad tunes of
Old unhappy far off-things
And battles long ago