Chapter 3

I was not an industrious student and knew only what I had found by
accident, and I had found "nothing I cared for after Titian--and
Titian I knew chiefly from a copy of 'the supper of Emmaus' in
Dublin--till Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites;" and among my father's
friends were no Pre-Raphaelites. Some indeed had come to Bedford
Park in the enthusiasm of the first building, and others to be
near those that had. There was Todhunter, a well-off man who had
bought my father's pictures while my father was still Pre-
Raphaelite. Once a Dublin doctor he was a poet and a writer of
poetical plays: a tall, sallow, lank, melancholy man, a good
scholar and a good intellect; and with him my father carried on a
warm exasperated friendship, fed I think by old memories and
wasted by quarrels over matters of opinion. Of all the survivors
he was the most dejected, and the least estranged, and I remember
encouraging him, with a sense of worship shared, to buy a very
expensive carpet designed by Morris. He displayed it without
strong liking and would have agreed had there been any to find
fault. If he had liked anything strongly he might have been a
famous man, for a few years later he was to write, under some
casual patriotic impulse, certain excellent verses now in all
Irish anthologies; but with him every book was a new planting and
not a new bud on an old bough. He had I think no peace in himself.
But my father's chief friend was York Powell, a famous Oxford
Professor of history, a broad-built, broad-headed, brown-bearded
man, clothed in heavy blue cloth and looking, but for his glasses
and the dim sight of a student, like some captain in the merchant
service. One often passed with pleasure from Todhunter's company
to that of one who was almost ostentatiously at peace. He cared
nothing for philosophy, nothing for economics, nothing for the
policy of nations, for history, as he saw it, was a memory of men
who were amusing or exciting to think about. He impressed all who
met him & seemed to some a man of genius, but he had not enough
ambition to shape his thought, or conviction to give rhythm to his
style, and remained always a poor writer. I was too full of
unfinished speculations and premature convictions to value rightly
his conversation, in-formed by a vast erudition, which would give
itself to every casual association of speech and company precisely
because he had neither cause nor design. My father, however, found
Powell's concrete narrative manner a necessary completion of his
own; and when I asked him, in a letter many years later, where he
got his philosophy, replied 'From York Powell' and thereon added,
no doubt remembering that Powell was without ideas, 'By looking at
him.' Then there was a