Elizabethan sea-captain that is to accompany the black, silky beard of his early London days; he suggests rather some Hellenized Roman of the third century, though there are times when his personality is enveloped in a kind of shadow. He is reserved and yet, one would say, eager for experience, affectionate and suspicious, precise and slightly prosaic, but full of the keenest sort of aesthetic subtleties. His talk, enchanting in the presence of a single companion, bristles with intense little preferences and sharp little exclusions. His personal pride appears to be almost morbidly over-developed. Of what is he thinking? He has not been able to forget the humiliation of those first hours of the war, his accident, his invalidism. He remembers his childhood, the failure that he had been in the eyes of his tutors, his inability either to grasp the rudiments of his studies or to play with other boys. He had scarcely known a time in those days when he would not have been willing to exchange his lot for that of somebody else, with the assured certainty of gaining by the bargain! He is determined to vindicate his existence, to write as man has never written before: had he not convinced himself, in the face of Mr Lincoln's call for volunteers, that this might be "at least a negative of combat, an organized, not a loose and empty one, something definitely and firmly parallel to action in the tented field"? He is infinitely curious about life; his sensibilities are clear and fresh. For the rest, he is circumspect and somewhat prim. Should an artist have passions? He believes that an examination of this question is always premature. Like Longmere, in Madame de Mauves, he has in his composition a lurking principle of asceticism to whose authority he has ever paid an unquestioning respect. Like Longueville, in Confidence, he is annoyed when he discovers that he has obeyed a force which he was unable to measure at the time; he has little taste for giving himself up and never does so without very soon wishing to take himself back. Like Roderick Hudson, in the latter's first phase, he has a tendency to regard all things in the light of his art, to hand over his impulses to his genius to be dealt with, to invest every gain of soul or sense in the enterprise of planned production. . . . Does he strike us as somewhat dry, cold, and frugal, this young man who yet nourishes in his heart an inordinate appetite for colour and form, for the picturesque and the romantic? . . . One thing may be said of him: if he has been estranged from life, his lot has been
