ad masters, but very useful ministers towards the
understanding, towards an analytical survey, of all that the intellect
has produced.

But something held him back: not so much [31] a reluctancy of
temperament, or of physical constitution (common enough cause why men
of undeniable gifts fail of commensurate production) but a cause purely
intellectual--the presence in him, namely, of a certain vein of
opinion; that other, constituent but contending, person, in his complex
nature. "The relation of thought to action," he writes, "filled my
mind on waking, and I found myself carried towards a bizarre formula,
which seems to have something of the night still clinging about it.
Action is but coarsened thought." That is but an ingenious
metaphysical point, as he goes on to show. But, including in "action"
that literary production in which the line of his own proper activity
lay, he followed--followed often--that fastidious utterance to a
cynical and pessimistic conclusion.

Maia, as he calls it, the empty "Absolute" of the Buddhist, the
"Infinite," the "All," of which those German metaphysicians he loved
only too well have had so much to say: this was for ever to give the
go-by to all positive, finite, limited interests whatever. The vague
pretensions of an abstract expression acted on him with all the force
of a prejudice. "The ideal," he admits, [32] "poisons for me all
imperfect possession"; and again, "The Buddhist tendency in me blunts
the faculty of free self-government, and weakens the power of action. I
feel a terror of action and am only at ease in the impersonal,
disinterested, and objective line of thought." But then, again, with
him "action" meant chiefly literary production. He quotes with
approval those admirable words from Goethe, "In der Beschrankung zeigt
sich erst der Meister"; yet still always finds himself wavering between
"frittering myself away on the infinitely little, and longing after
what is unknown and distant." There is, doubtless, over and above the
physical consumptive tendency, an instinctive turn of sentiment in this
touching confession. Still, what strengthened both tendencies was that
metaphysical prejudice for the "Absolute," the false intellectual
conscience. "I have always avoided what attracted me, and turned my
back upon the point where secretly I desired to be"; and, of course,
that is not the way to a free and generous productivity, in literature,
or in anything else; though