our dress, in our manner, in our
opinions, and in our style.

Why should men, who spoke their opinions in low voices, as though they
feared to disturb the readers in some ancient library, and timidly as
though they knew that all subjects had long since been explored, all
questions long since decided in books whereon the dust settled--live lives
of such disorder and seek to rediscover in verse the syntax of impulsive
common life? Was it that we lived in what is called "an age of transition"
and so lacked coherence, or did we but pursue antithesis?

VI

All things, apart from love and melancholy, were a study to us; Horne
already learned in Botticelli had begun to boast that when he wrote of him
there would be no literature, all would be but learning; Symons, as I
wrote when I first met him, studied the music halls, as he might have
studied the age of Chaucer; while I gave much time to what is called the
Christian Cabala; nor was there any branch of knowledge Johnson did not
claim for his own. When I had first gone to see him in 1888 or 1889, at
the Charlotte Street house, I had called about five in the afternoon, but
the man servant that he shared with Horne and Image, told me that he was
not yet up, adding with effusion "he is always up for dinner at seven."
This habit of breakfasting when others dined had been started by insomnia,
but he came to defend it for its own sake. When I asked if it did not
separate him from men and women he replied, "In my library I have all the
knowledge of the world that I need." He had certainly a considerable
library, far larger than that of any young man of my acquaintance, so
large that he wondered if it might not be possible to find some way of
hanging new shelves from the ceiling like chandeliers. That room was
always a pleasure to me, with its curtains of grey corduroy over door and
window and book case, and its walls covered with brown paper, a fashion
invented, I think, by Horne, that was soon to spread. There was a portrait
of Cardinal Newman, looking a little like Johnson himself, some religious
picture by Simeon Solomon, and works upon theology in Greek and Latin and
a general air of neatness and severity; and talking there by candle light
it never seemed very difficult to murmur Villiers de L'isle Adam's proud
words, "As for living--our servants will do that for us." Yet I can now
see that Johnson himself in some hidden, half-conscious part of him
desired the world he had r