The pity of it is that Brown had something of the Celtic spirit—­ the melancholy, the mystery of that sensitive and delicate temperament; but it is vitiated by what I can only call a schoolmaster’s humour—­cheap and silly, such as imposes on immature minds.  When he was quite serious and simple, he wrote beautiful, quiet, wise letters, dealing with deep things in a dignified way; but, as a rule, he thought it necessary to cut ugly capers, and to do what can only be described as playing the fool.  I wish with all my heart that these letters had not been published; they deform and disfigure a beautiful spirit and a quick imagination.

Pose, affectation—­what a snare they are to the better kind of minds.  I declare that I value every day more and more the signs of simplicity, the people who say what they mean, and as they mean it; who don’t think what they think is expected of them, but what they really feel; who don’t pretend to enjoy what they don’t enjoy, or to understand what they don’t understand.

I may be all wrong about Brown, of course, for the victory always remains with the people who admire, rather than with the people who criticise; people cannot be all on the same plane, and it is of no use to quench enthusiasm by saying, “When you are older and wiser you will think differently.”  The result of that kind of snub is only to make people hold their tongues, and think one an old-fashioned pedant.  I sometimes wonder whether there is an absolute standard of beauty at all, whether taste is not a sort of epidemic contagion, and whether the accredited man of taste is not, as some one says, the man who has the good fortune to agree most emphatically with the opinion of the majority.

I am sure, however, you would not like the book; though I don’t say that you might not extract, as I do to my shame, a kind of bitter pleasure in thinking how unconsciously absurd it is—­the pleasure one gets from watching the movements and gestures, and listening to the remarks of a profoundly affected and complacent person.  But that is not an elevated kind of pleasure, when all is said and done!

              “We get no good,
     By being ungenerous, even to a book!”

as Mrs. Browning says. . . .—­Ever yours.

T. B.

Upton,
Nov. 15, 1904.

My dear Herbert,—­A controversy, a contest!  How they poison all one’s thoughts!  I am at present wading, as Ruskin says, in a sad marsh or pool of thought.  Let me indicate to you without excessive detail the kind of thing that is going on.

We have been discussing the introduction here of certain important educational reforms, in the direction of modernising and simplifying our curriculum.