a superficial life--he
used to say that he had neither aims nor ambitions--he took very little
interest in his work and not much interest in games. He just desired to
escape censure, and he was not greedy of praise. There was nothing
listless or dreamy about it all. If he neglected his work, it was
because he found talk and laughter more interesting. No string ran
through his days; they were just to be taken as they came, enjoyed,
dismissed. But he never wanted to appear other than he was, or to be
admired or deferred to. There was never any sense of pose about hint nor
the smallest affectation. He was very indifferent as to what was thought
of him, and not sensitive; but he held his own, and insisted on his
rights, allowed no dictation, followed no lead. All the time, I suppose,
he was gathering in impressions of the outsides of things--he did not
dip beyond that: he was full of quite definite tastes, desires, and
prejudices; and though he was interested in life, he was not
particularly interested in what lay behind it. He was not in the least
impressionable, in the sense that others influenced or diverted him
from his own ideas.

Neither had he any strong intellectual bent. The knowledge which he
needed he acquired quickly and soon forgot it. I do not think he ever
went deeply into things in those early days, or tried to perfect himself
in any sort of knowledge. He was neither generous nor acquisitive; he
was detached, and always rather apt to put his little possessions away
and to forget about them. It was always the present he was concerned
with; he did not deal with the past nor with the future.

Then after what had been not so much a slumber of the spirit as a vivid
living among immediate impressions, the artistic nature began to awake
in him. Music, architecture, ceremony, began to make their appeal felt;
and he then first recognised the beauty of literary style. But even so,
he did not fling himself creatively into any of these things at first,
even as an amateur; it was still the perception of effects that he was
concerned with.

It was then, during his first year at Cambridge, that the first
promptings of a vocation made themselves felt towards the priesthood.
But he was as yet wholly unaware of his powers of expression; and I am
sure that his first leanings to the clerical life were a search for a
quiet and secluded fortress, away from the world, in which he might
pursue an undisturbed and ordered life of