a shower of sand; a little of it lodged on inaccessible
ledges, but most of it was spilt in the void. He saw that his only
hope was to strengthen and enlarge his existing preferences, and that
the best that he could hope to arrive at was to classify and
systematise such knowledge as he at present possessed. It was too late
to take a new departure, or to aim at any completeness of view. The
mental discipline that he required, and of which he felt an urgent
need, must be attained by a diligent sorting of his own mental stores,
haphazard and disjointed as they were. And after all, he felt, there
was room in the world for many kinds of minds. Mental discipline from
the academical point of view was a very important thing, perhaps the
thing that the ordinary type of public schoolboy was most in need of.
But there was another province too, the province of mental
appreciation, and it was in this field that Hugh felt himself competent
to labour. It seemed to him that there were many young men at the
university, capable of intellectual pleasure, who had been starved by
the at once diffuse and dignified curriculum of classical education.
Hugh felt that he himself had been endowed with an excess of the
imaginative and artistic quality, and that, owing to natural instincts
and intellectual home-surroundings, he had struck out a path for
himself; books had been to Hugh from his earliest years channels of
communication with other minds. He could not help doubting whether
they ever developed qualities or delights that did not naturally exist
in a rudimentary form in the mind which fell under their influences.
He could not, in looking back, trace the originating power of any book
on his own mind; the ideas of others had rather acted in fertilising
the germs which lay dormant in his own heart. They had deepened the
channels of his own thoughts, they had revealed him to himself; but
there had always been, he thought, an unconscious power of selection at
work; so that uncongenial ideas, unresponsive thoughts, had merely
danced off the surface without affecting any lodgment. He had gained
in taste and discrimination, but he could not trace any impulse from
literature which had set him exploring a totally unfamiliar region.
Sometimes he had resolutely submitted his mind to the leadership of a
new author; but he had always known in his heart that the pilgrimage
would be in vain. He felt that he would have gained if he had known
this