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‘Not he. The eye only sees that which it brings within the power of seeing; and all I shall say of him is, that a certain apparition in white leathers was at one period of its appearance dimly conscious of equestrian motion towards a certain brown two-horned phenomenon, and other spotted phenomena, at which he had been taught by habit to make the articulate noises “stag” and “hounds,” among certain grey, and green, and brown phenomena, at which the same habit and the example of his fellows had taught him to say, “Rock, and wood, and mountain,” and perhaps the further noises of “Lovely, splendid, majestic.”‘

‘As usual, sir! You dwellers in Babylon fancy that you have the monopoly of all the intellect, and all the taste, because you earn your livings by talking about pretty things, and painting pretty things: little do you suspect, shut up together in your little literary worlds, and your artistic worlds, how many thousands of us outside barbarians there are who see as clearly, and enjoy as deeply as you do: but hold their tongues about their own feelings, simply because they have never been driven by emptiness of pocket to look round for methods of expressing them. And, after all–how much of nature can you express? You confest yourself yesterday baffled by all the magnificence around you.’

‘Yes! to paint it worthily one would require to be a Turner, a Copley Fielding, and a Creswick, all in one.’

‘And did you ever remark how such scenes as this gorge of the “Watersmeet” stir up a feeling of shame, almost of peevishness, before the sense of a mysterious meaning which we ought to understand and cannot?’

He smiled.

‘Our torments do by length of time become our elements; and painful as that sensation is to the earnest artist, he will feel it, I fancy, at last sublime itself into an habitually gentle, reverent, almost melancholy tone of mind, as of a man bearing the burden of an infinite and wonderful message which his own frivolity and laziness hinder him from speaking out.’

‘Then it should beget in him, too, something of merciful indulgence towards the seeming stupidity of those who see, after all, only a very little shallower than he does into the unfathomable depths of nature.’

‘Well, sporting books and sportsmen seem to me, by their very object, not to be worth troubling our heads about. Out of nothing, comes nothing. See, my hands are as soft as any lady’s in Belgravia. I could not, to save my life, lift a hundredweight a foot off the ground; while you have been a wild man of the woods, a leaper of ditches, a rower of races, and a wanton destroyer of all animal life: and yet–‘

‘You would hint politely that you are as open as me to all noble, and chivalrous, and truly manly emotions?’

‘What think you?’

‘That you are far worthier in such matters than I, friend. But do not forget that it may be your intellect, and your profession–in one word, Heaven’s mercy–which have steered you clear of shoals upon which you will find the mass of our class founder. Woe to the class or the nation which has no manly physical training! Look at the manners, the morals, the faces of the young men of the shopkeeping classes, if you wish to see the effects of utterly neglecting the physical development of man; {3} of fancying that all the muscular activity he requires under the sun is to be able to stand behind a counter, or sit on a desk-stool without tumbling off. Be sure, be sure, that ever since the days of the Persians of old, effeminacy, if not twin-sister of cowardice and dishonesty, has always gone hand in hand with them. To that utter neglect of any exercises which call out fortitude, patience, self-dependence, and daring, I attribute a great deal of the low sensuality, the conceited vulgarity, the want of a high sense of honour, which is increasing just now among the middle classes; and from which the navigator, the engineer, the miner, and the sailor are comparatively free.’