The friend with whom I have been staying is a man of considerable wealth.  He has no occupation but the pursuit of culture.  He is married to a charming wife, also wealthy; but they are childless, and the result is that they have nothing to expend their energies upon except books and art and society.  At long intervals my friend produces a tiny volume, beautifully printed and bound, which he presents to his friends.  Last year it was an account of some curious religious ceremonies which he came across in a tour in Brittany.  I dare say I am wrong, but it seems to me that the only charm of these grotesque and absurd rites is that country people should practise them quietly and secretly, as a matter of old and customary tradition.  The moment that the cultivated stranger comes among them with his philological and sociological explanations, their pretty significance seems to me to be gone.  I do not care a brass farthing what they are all about; they are old, they are legendary; as performed by people who have grown up among them, and seen them practised from childhood as a matter of course, they have a certain grace of congruity about them, as the schoolmen say.  But printed gravely in a book they seem to me to be nothing but barbarous and foolish games of childish import.

Another year he found some Finnish legends when he was on a yachting cruise, which he translated into an ungainly English.  The tales are utterly worthless, not a spark of romance from beginning to end, only typical of an age which I humbly thank God we have left behind.

This year he is full of Balearic music; he played me a number of dreary and monotonous tunes, which he said were so characteristic.  But if they were characteristic, and I have no reason to doubt his word, they only seem to me to prove that those islanders are destitute of musical taste and instinct to a quite singular degree.

While I was up in town, my friends certainly did their best to amuse me; they had agreeable people of a literary type to luncheon, tea, and dinner.  We heard some music, we went to a play or two, we went to look at some pictures.  But I confess to having laboured under an increasing depression, because the whole thing was conducted by rule and line, and in a terribly businesslike way; we knew beforehand exactly what we were to look out for.  We did not go in a liberal and expectant spirit, hoping that we might find or see or hear some unexpectedly beautiful thing, but we went in a severely critical spirit, to see if we could detect how the painters and musicians, whose art we were to inspect, deviated from received methods.  We went, indeed, not to gain an impression of originality and personality, but to look out for certain tabulated qualities; it depressed me too, perhaps unduly, to hear the jargon with which these criticisms were heralded.  The triumph appeared to be to use a set of terms, appropriate to one art, of the effects produced by the others; thus in music we went in search of colour