Eliot that I became angry and disillusioned & worked myself into a quarrel
or half-quarrel. I had read all Victor Hugo's romances and a couple of
Balzac's and was in no mind to like her. She seemed to have a distrust or
a distaste for all in life that gives one a springing foot. Then too she
knew so well how to enforce her distaste by the authority of her
mid-Victorian science or by some habit of mind of its breeding, that I,
who had not escaped the fascination of what I loathed, doubted while the
book lay open whatsoever my instinct knew of splendour. She disturbed me
and alarmed me, but when I spoke of her to my father, he threw her aside
with a phrase, "Oh, she was an ugly woman who hated handsome men and
handsome women;" and he began to praise "Wuthering Heights."

Only the other day, when I got Dowden's letters, did I discover for how
many years the friendship between Dowden and my father had been an
antagonism. My father had written from Fitzroy Road in the sixties that
the brotherhood, by which he meant the poet Edwin Ellis, Nettleship and
himself, "abhorred Wordsworth;" and Dowden, not remembering that another
week would bring a different mood and abhorrence, had written a pained and
solemn letter. My father had answered that Dowden believed too much in the
intellect and that all valuable education was but a stirring up of the
emotions and had added that this did not mean excitability. "In the
completely emotional man," he wrote, "the least awakening of feeling is a
harmony in which every chord of every feeling vibrates. Excitement is the
feature of an insufficiently emotional nature, the harsh vibrating
discourse of but one or two chords." Living in a free world accustomed to
the gay exaggeration of the talk of equals, of men who talk and write to
discover truth and not for popular instruction, he had already, when both
men were in their twenties, decided it is plain that Dowden was a
Provincial.

XXV

It was only when I began to study psychical research and mystical
philosophy that I broke away from my father's influence. He had been a
follower of John Stuart Mill and had grown to manhood with the scientific
movement. In this he had never been of Rossetti's party who said that it
mattered to nobody whether the sun went round the earth or the earth round
the sun. But through this new research, this reaction from popular
science, I had begun to feel that I had allies for my secret thought. Once
when I was i