Lunar Theory. But when he went down from
Cambridge for good, being a man of some means, he travelled. For a
year he was an honorary Attache at one of the big Embassies. He finally
settled in London with a vague idea of some day writing a _magnum opus_
about the stupidity of mankind; for he had come to the conclusion by the
age of twenty-five that all men were stupid, irreclaimably, irredeemably
stupid; that everything was wrong; that all literature was really bad,
all art much overrated, and all music tedious in the long run.

The years slipped by and he never began his _magnum opus_; he joined
a literary club instead and discussed the current topic of the day.
Sometimes he wrote a short article; never in the daily Press, which he
despised, nor in the reviews (for he never wrote anything as long as a
magazine article), but in a literary weekly he would express in weary
and polished phrases the unemphatic boredom or the mitigated approval
with which the works of his fellow-men inspired him. He was the kind of
man who had nothing in him you could positively dislike, but to whom
you could not talk for five minutes without having a vague sensation of
blight. Things seemed to shrivel up in his presence as though they had
been touched by an insidious east wind, a subtle frost, a secret chill.
He never praised anything, though he sometimes condescended to approve.
The faint puffs of blame in which he more generally indulged were never
sharp or heavy, but were like the smoke rings of a cigarette which a man
indolently smoking blows from time to time up to the ceiling.

He lived in rooms in the Temple. They were comfortably, not luxuriously
furnished; a great many French books--French was the only modern
language worth reading he used to say--a few modern German etchings, a
low Turkish divan, and some Egyptian antiquities, made up the furniture
of his two sitting-rooms. Above all things he despised Greek art;
it was, he said decadent. The Egyptians and the Germans were, in his
opinion, the only people who knew anything about the plastic arts,
whereas the only music he could endure was that of the modern French
School. Over his chimney-piece there was a large German landscape
in oils, called "Im Walde"; it represented a wood at twilight in the
autumn, and if you looked at it carefully and for a long time you saw
that the objects depicted were meant to be trees from which the leaves
were falling; but if you looked at the picture c