matter of fact, people who practise self-restraint, who are
temperate and quiet, do retain a gracious kind of contentment in
all that they do or say, or think, to extreme old age; it is the
jaded weariness of overstrained lives that needs the stimulus of
excitement to carry them along from hour to hour. Who does not
remember the rigid asceticism of Ruskin's childhood? A bunch of
keys to play with, and a little later a box of bricks; the Bible
and The Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe to read; a summary
whipping if he fell down and hurt himself, or if he ever cried. Yet
no one would venture to say that this austerity in any way stunted
Ruskin's development or limited his range of pleasures; it made him
perhaps a little submissive and unadventurous. But who that ever
saw him, as the most famous art-critic of the day, being
mercilessly snubbed, when he indulged in paradoxes, by the old
wine-merchant, or being told to hold his tongue by the grim old
mother, and obeying cheerfully and sweetly, would have preferred
him to have been loud, contradictory, and self-assertive? The
mischief of our present system of publicity is that we cannot enjoy
our own ideas, unless we can impress people with them, or, at all
events, impress people with a sense of our enjoyment of them. There
is a noble piece of character-drawing in one of Mr. Henry James's
novels, The Portrait of a Lady, where Gilbert Osmond, a selfish
dilettante, finding that he cannot make a great success or attain a
great position, devotes himself to trying to mystify and provoke
the curiosity of the world by retiring into a refined seclusion,
and professing that it affords him an exquisite kind of enjoyment.
The hideous vulgarity of his attitude is not at first sight
apparent; he deceives the heroine, who is a considerable heiress,
into thinking that here, at last, is a man who is living a quiet
and sincere life among the things of the soul; and having obtained