Well, he has found every one against him in his adversity, and has suffered from all the petty intrigues of a small and rather narrow-minded society.  His suggestions have been scouted, he has been pointedly excluded from all share in the management of the club, and treated with scanty civility.  I don’t suppose that all this has given him as much pain as one would imagine, because he has all the impenetrability and want of perception of the real egoist.  I am told that he used to be treated at one time in the club with indifference, hostility, and even brutality.  But he is not a man to be suppressed—­he works hard, writes reviews, articles, and books, and pays elaborate civilities to all new members.  I have only seen him at long intervals of late years; but he has stayed with me once or twice, and has often pressed me to go and see him in town.  I had some business to attend there this Christmas, and I proposed myself.  He wrote a letter of cordial welcome, and I have now been his guest for four days.

I can’t express to you the poignant distress which my visit has caused me; not exactly a personal distress, for Hardy is not a man to be directly pitied; but the pathos of the whole thing is very great.  His house has large and beautiful rooms, and I recognised many of the little treasures—­portraits, engravings, statuettes, busts, and books—­which used to adorn the house in Half Moon Street.  But the man himself!  He has altered very little in personal appearance.  He still moves briskly, and, except that his hair is nearly white, I could imagine him to be the same hero that I used to worship.  But his egoism has grown upon him to such an extent that his mind is hardly recognisable.  He still talks brilliantly and suggestively at times; and I find myself every now and then amazed by some stroke of genius in his talk, some familiar thing shown in a new and interesting light, some ray of poetry or emotion thrown on to some dusty and well-known subject.  But he has become a man of grievances; he still has, at the beginning of a talk, some of the fine charm of sympathy.  He will begin by saying that he wants to know what one thinks of a point, and he will smile in the old affectionate kind of way, as one might smile at a favourite child; but he will then plunge into a fiery monologue about his ambitions and his work.  He declaims away, with magnificent gestures.  He still interlards his talk with personal appeals for approbation, for concurrence, for encouragement; but it is clear he does not expect an answer, and his demands for sympathy have little more personal value than the reiterated statement in the Litany that we are miserable sinners has in the mouth of many respectable church-goers.

The result is that I find myself greatly fatigued by my visit.  I have spent several hours of every day in his society, and I do not suppose that I have uttered a dozen consecutive words; yet many of his statements would be well worth discussing, if he were capable of discussion.