. Then, too,
they were very ignorant men; they read nothing, for nothing mattered but
"knowing how to paint," being in reaction against a generation that seemed
to have wasted its time upon so many things. I thought myself alone in
hating these young men, now indeed getting towards middle life, their
contempt for the past, their monopoly of the future, but in a few months I
was to discover others of my own age, who thought as I did, for it is not
true that youth looks before it with the mechanical gaze of a well-drilled
soldier. Its quarrel is not with the past, but with the present, where its
elders are so obviously powerful and no cause seems lost if it seem to
threaten that power. Does cultivated youth ever really love the future,
where the eye can discover no persecuted Royalty hidden among oak leaves,
though from it certainly does come so much proletarian rhetoric?

I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only. I am very
religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the
simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion, almost
an infallible church out of poetic tradition: a fardel of stories, and of
personages, and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression,
passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters with some
help from philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world, where I
could discover this tradition perpetually, and not in pictures and in
poems only, but in tiles round the chimney-piece and in the hangings that
kept out the draught. I had even created a dogma: "Because those imaginary
people are created out of the deepest instinct of man, to be his measure
and his norm, whatever I can imagine those mouths speaking may be the
nearest I can go to truth." When I listened they seemed always to speak of
one thing only: they, their loves, every incident of their lives, were
steeped in the supernatural. Could even Titian's "Ariosto" that I loved
beyond other portraits have its grave look, as if waiting for some perfect
final event, if the painters before Titian had not learned portraiture,
while painting into the corner of compositions full of saints and
Madonnas, their kneeling patrons? At seventeen years old I was already an
old-fashioned brass cannon full of shot, and nothing had kept me from
going off but a doubt as to my capacity to shoot straight.

III

I was not an industrious student and knew only what I had found by
accident