misunderstood him; and even
when he rapturously and unctuously belauds some figure that I admire, I
feel my admiration to be smirched and tarnished.

The one quality which I think he always misses in a character is a
high, pure, delicate sense of beauty, the subtlest fibre of poetry.
This my swashbuckler misnames sentimentality--and thus I feel that he
always tends to admire the wrong qualities, because he condones even
what he calls sentimentality in one whom he chooses to admire.

It is this attitude of disdain and scorn, based upon the intellect
rather than upon the soul, that I think is one of the most terrible and
satanical things in life. Such a quality may be valuable in scientific
research, it may be successful in politics, because there are still
among us many elementary people who really like to see a man
belaboured; it may be successful in business, it may being a man
wealth, position, and a certain kind of influence. But it never
inspires confidence or affection; and though such a man may be feared
and respected on the stage of life, there is an invariable and general
sense of relief when he quits it.

"The fruit of the Spirit," wrote the wise apostle--who knew, too, the
bitter pleasures of a vehement controversy, and was no milk-and-water
saint--"the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, meekness,
long-suffering, kindness." None of these fruits hang upon the vigorous
boughs of our friend's tree. He is rather like that detestable and
spidery thing the araucaria, which has a wound for every tender hand,
and invites no bright-eyed feathered songsters to perch or build among
its sinister branches.

The only critic who helps me is the critic whose humility keeps pace
with his acuteness, who leads me gently where he has himself trodden
patiently and observantly, and does not attempt to disfigure and ravage
the regions which he has not been able to desire to explore. The man
who will show me unsuspected connections, secret paths of thought, who
will teach me how to extend my view, how I may pass quietly from the
known to the unknown; who will show me that stars and flowers have
voices, and that running water has a quiet spirit of its own; and who
in the strange world of human life will unveil for me the hopes and
fears, the deep and varied passions, that bind men together and part
them, and that seem to me such unreasonable and inexplicable things if
they are bounded by the narrow fences of life--emotions