an artist...."

After a large and serious movement through his mind he came back to
Science, Philosophy or Politics as the sole three justifications for the
usurpation of leisure.

So far as devotion to science went, he knew he had no specific aptitude
for any departmentalized subject, and equally he felt no natural call to
philosophy. He was left with politics....

"Or else, why shouldn't I go down there and pick up a shovel and set to
work? To make leisure for my betters...."

And now it was that he could take up the real trouble that more than
anything else had been keeping him ineffective and the prey of every
chance demand and temptation during the last ten months. He had not been
able to get himself into politics, and the reason why he had not been
able to do so was that he could not induce himself to fit in. Statecraft
was a remote and faded thing in the political life of the time; politics
was a choice of two sides in a game, and either side he found equally
unattractive. Since he had come down from Cambridge the Tariff Reform
people had gone far to capture the Conservative party. There was little
chance of a candidature for him without an adhesion to that. And
he could find nothing he could imagine himself working for in the
declarations of the Tariff Reform people. He distrusted them, he
disliked them. They took all the light and pride out of imperialism,
they reduced it to a shabby conspiracy of the British and their colonies
against foreign industrialism. They were violent for armaments and
hostile to education. They could give him no assurance of any scheme of
growth and unification, and no guarantees against the manifest dangers
of economic disturbance and political corruption a tariff involves.
Imperialism without noble imaginations, it seemed to him, was simply
nationalism with megalomania. It was swaggering, it was greed, it was
German; its enthusiasm was forced, its nobility a vulgar lie. No. And
when he turned to the opposite party he found little that was more
attractive. They were prepared, it seemed, if they came into office, to
pull the legislature of the British Isles to pieces in obedience to the
Irish demand for Home Rule, and they were totally unprepared with any
scheme for doing this that had even a chance of success. In the twenty
years that had elapsed since Gladstone's hasty and disastrous essay in
political surgery they had studied nothing, learnt nothing, produced no
ideas whatever i