MENTAL QUALITIES. 8 I 



I have said that in one respect my mind has changed 

 during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of 

 thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works 

 of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, 

 gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took 

 intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical 

 plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me con- 

 siderable, and music very great delight. But now for many 

 years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry : I have tried 

 lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull 

 that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for 

 pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too en- 

 ergetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving 

 me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does 

 not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. 

 On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagina- 

 tion, though not of a very high order, have been for years 

 a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all 

 novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, 

 and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end un- 

 happily — against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, 

 according to my taste, does not come into the first class 

 unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly 

 love, and if a pretty woman all the better. 



This curious and lamentable loss of the higher sesthetic 

 tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and 

 travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may 

 contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as 

 much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a 

 kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collec- 

 tions of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy 

 of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes 

 depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly 

 organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I sup- 

 pose, have thus suffered ; and if I had to live my life again, 

 I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to 

 some music at least once every week ; for perhaps the parts 



