ot a person to conceive
that others might in bad moments listen for the trumpet in vain. It
would never have occurred to her that only the day before he had spent a
part of the afternoon quite at the bottom of the hill. He had in fact
turned into the National Gallery and had wandered about there for more
than an hour, and it was just while he did so that the immitigable
recoil had begun perversely to make itself felt. The perversity was all
the greater from the fact that if the experience was depressing this was
not because he had been discouraged beyond measure by the sight of the
grand things that had been done--things so much grander than any that
would ever bear his signature. That variation he was duly acquainted
with and should know in abundance again. What had happened to him, as he
passed on this occasion from Titian to Rubens and from Gainsborough to
Rembrandt, was that he found himself calling the whole exhibited art
into question. What was it after all at the best and why had people
given it so high a place? Its weakness, its limits broke upon him;
tacitly blaspheming he looked with a lustreless eye at the palpable,
polished, "toned" objects designed for suspension on hooks. That is, he
blasphemed if it were blasphemy to feel that as bearing on the energies
of man they were a poor and secondary show. The human force producing
them was so far from one of the greatest; their place was a small place
and their connexion with the heroic life casual and slight. They
represented so little great ideas, and it was great ideas that kept the
world from chaos. He had incontestably been in much closer relation with
them a few months before than he was to-day: it made up a great deal
for what was false and hollow, what was merely personal, in "politics"
that, were the idea greater or smaller, they could at their best so
directly deal with it. The love of it had really been much of the time
at the bottom of his impulse to follow them up; though this was not what
he had most talked of with his political friends or even with Julia. No,
political as Julia was, he had not conferred with her much about the
idea. However, this might have been his own fault quite as much as hers,
and she in fact took such things, such enthusiasms, for granted--there
was an immense deal in every way that she took for granted. On the other
hand, he had often put forward this brighter side of the care for the
public weal in his discussions with Gabriel