His
intellect, unexhausted by speculation or casuistry, was wholly at
the service of hand and eye, and whatever he pleased he did with
an unheard of ease and simplicity, and if style and vocabulary
were at times monotonous, he could not have made them otherwise
without ceasing to be himself. Instead of the language of Chaucer
and Shakespeare, its warp fresh from field and market, if the woof
were learned, his age offered him a speech, exhausted from
abstraction, that only returned to its full vitality when written
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.
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