rmonised, could open a
door for him into a beautiful world of dreams. He was quite aware that
he often liked what would be called the wrong things; but what he was
on the look-out for in art was not technical perfection or finished
skill, but a certain indefinable poetical suggestion, which pictures
could give him, when they came before him in certain moods. The mood,
indeed, mattered more than the picture; moreover it was one of the
strangest things about pictorial art, that the work of certain artists
seemed able to convey poetical suggestion, even when the poetical
quality seemed to be absent from their own souls. He knew a certain
great artist well, who seemed to Hugh to be an essentially
materialistic man, fond of sport and society, of money, and the
pleasures that money could buy, who spoke of poetical emotion as
moonshine, and seemed frankly bored by any attempt at the mystical
apprehension of beautiful things, who could yet produce, by means of
his mastery of the craft, pictures full of the tenderest and loveliest
emotion and poetry. Hugh tried hard to discern this quality in the
man's soul, tried to believe that it was there, and that it was
deliberately disguised by a pose of bluff unaffectedness. But he came
to the conclusion that it was not there, and that the painter achieved
his results only by being able to represent with incredible fidelity
the things in nature that held the poetical quality. On the other hand
he had a friend of real poetical genius, who was also an artist, but
who could only produce the stiffest and hardest works of art, that had
no quality about them except the quality of tiresome definiteness.
This was a great mystery to Hugh; but it ended eventually, after a
serious endeavour to appreciate what was approved by the general
verdict to be of supreme artistic value, in making him resolve that he
would just follow his own independent taste, and discern whatever
quality of beauty he could, in such art as made an appeal to him. Thus
he was not even an eclectic; he was a mere amateur; he treated art just
as a possible vehicle of poetical suggestion, and allowed it to speak
to him when and where it could and would.

He had moreover a great suspicion of conventionality in taste. A man
of accredited taste often seemed to him little more than a man who had
the faculty of admiring what it was the fashion to admire. Hugh had
been for a short time under the influence of Ruskin, and had tri