a deliberate choice in the matter, guided, he now felt, rather by a
kind of intuition than by any very definite principle, and determined
to restrict his artistic energies to a single form of art. His father,
he remembered, had remonstrated with him, and had said that by giving
up sketching he was sacrificing a great resource of recreation and
amusement. He had no answer at the time to the criticism, but it
seemed to him that he knew his own mind in the matter, and that as he
could not hope, he thought, to attain to any real excellence in
draughtsmanship, it had better be cut off altogether, and his energies,
such as they were--he knew that the spring was not a copious
one--confined to a more definite channel.

As life went on, and as time became more and more precious, as his
literary work more and more absorbed him, he drew away from the
artistic region; in his early years of manhood he had travelled a good
deal, and the seeing of pictures had always been part of the programme;
but his work became heavier, and the holidays had tended more and more
to be spent in some quiet English retreat, where he could satisfy his
delight in nature, and re-read some of the old beloved books. A
certain physical indolence was also a factor, an indolence which made
wandering in a picture-gallery always rather a penance; but he
contrived at intervals to go and look at pictures in London in a
leisurely way, both old and new; and he had one or two friends who
possessed fine works of art, which could be enjoyed calmly and quietly.
He was aware that he was losing some catholicity of mind by this--but
he knew his limitations, and more and more became aware that his
constitutional energy was not very great, and needed to be husbanded.
He was quite aware that he was not what would be called a cultivated
person, that his knowledge both of art and music was feeble and
amateurish; but he saw, or thought he saw, that people of wide
cultivation often sacrificed in intensity what they gained in width;
and as he became gradually aware that the strongest faculty he
possessed was the literary faculty, he saw that he could not hope to
nourish it without a certain renunciation. He had no taste for
becoming an expert or a connoisseur; he had not the slightest wish to
instruct other people, or to arrive at a technical and professional
knowledge of art. He was content to leave it to be a rare luxury, a
thing which, when the opportunity and the mood ha