ghest fruitfulness of intellect were ever reached without this
generous faculty of idealisation, which Pattison, here and always,
viewed with such icy coldness. Napoleon used to say that what was most
fatal to a general was a knack of combining objects into pictures. A
good officer, he said, never makes pictures; he sees objects, as through
a field-glass, exactly as they are. In the art of war let us take
Napoleon's word for this; but in 'the art to live' a man who dreads to
idealise aims or to make pictures, who can think of nothing finer than
being what Aristotle calls [Greek: authekastos], or taking everything
literally for what it is, will sooner or later find his faculties
benumbed and his work narrowed to something for which nobody but himself
will care, and for which he will not himself always care with any
sincerity or depth of interest.

Let us take another illustration of the false exclusiveness of the
definition, in which Pattison erected a peculiar constitutional
idiosyncrasy into a complete and final law for the life literary. He
used to contend that in many respects the most admirable literary figure
of the eighteenth century was the poet Gray. Gray, he would say, never
thought that devotion to letters meant the making of books. He gave
himself up for the most part to ceaseless observation and acquisition.
By travelling, reading, noting, with a patient industry that would not
allow itself to be diverted or perturbed, he sought and gained the
discerning spirit and the power of appreciation which make not a book
but a man. He annotated the volumes that he read with judgment; he kept
botanical calendars and thermometrical registers; he had a lively
curiosity all round; and, in Gray's own words, he deemed it a sufficient
object of his studies to know, wherever he was, what lay within reach
that was worth seeing--whether building, ruin, park, garden, prospect,
picture, or monument--to whom it had ever belonged, and what had been
the characteristic and taste of different ages. 'Turn author,' said
Gray, 'and straightway you expose yourself to pit, boxes, and gallery:
any coxcomb in the world may come in and hiss if he pleases; ay, and
what is almost as bad, clap too, and you cannot hinder him.'

Nobody will be inclined to quarrel with Gray's way of passing his life,
and the poet who had produced so exquisite a masterpiece as the Elegy
had a fair right to spend the rest of his days as he pleased. But the
temptati