An Autobiography, vols 1,2 | Page 7

always will be happy, because my
father's nature turned out no waste product: he had none of that useless
stuff in him that lies in heaps near factories. He took his own happiness
with him, and was self-centred and self- sufficing: for a sociable being,
the most self-sufficing I have ever known; I can think of no one of such
vitality who was so independent of other people; he could golf alone,
play billiards alone, walk alone, shoot alone, fish alone, do everything
alone; and yet he was dependent on both my mother and my stepmother
and on all occasions loved simple playfellows. ... Some one to carry his
clubs, or to wander round the garden with, would make him perfectly
happy. It was at these times, I think, that my father was at his sweetest.
Calm as a sky after showers, he would discuss every topic with
tenderness and interest and appeared to be unupsettable; he had eternal
youth, and was unaffected by a financial world which had been
spinning round him all day.
"The striking thing about him was his freedom from suspicion. Thrown
from his earliest days among common, shrewd men of singularly
unspiritual ideals--most of them not only on the make but I might
almost say on the pounce--he advanced on his own lines rapidly and
courageously, not at all secretively--almost confidingly--yet he was
rarely taken in.
"He knew his fellow-creatures better in the East-end than in the
West-end of London and had a talent for making men love him; he
swept them along on the impulse of his own decided intentions. He was
never too busy nor too prosperous to help the struggling and was
shocked by meanness or sharp practice, however successful.
"There were some people whom my father never understood, good,

generous and high-minded as he was: the fanatic with eyes turned to no
known order of things filled him with electric impatience; he did not
care for priests, poets or philosophers; anything like indecision, change
of plans, want of order, method or punctuality, forgetfulness or
carelessness--even hesitation of voice and manner--drove him mad; his
temperament was like a fuse which a touch will explode, but the bomb
did not kill, it hurt the uninitiated but it consumed its own sparks. My
papa had no self- control, no possibility of learning it: it was an
unknown science, like geometry or algebra, to him; and he had very
little imagination. It was this combination--want of self-control and
want of imagination--which prevented him from being a thinker.
"He had great character, minute observation, a fine memory and all his
instincts were charged with almost superhuman vitality, but no one
could argue with him. Had the foundation of his character been as
unreasonable and unreliable as his temperament, he would have made
neither friends nor money; but he was fundamentally sound, ultimately
serene and high-minded in the truest sense of the word. He was a man
of intellect, but not an intellectual man; he did not really know anything
about the great writers or thinkers, although he had read odds and ends.
He was essentially a man of action and a man of will; this is why I call
him a man of intellect. He made up his mind in a flash, partly from
instinct and partly from will.
"He had the courage for life and the enterprise to spend his fortune on it.
He was kind and impulsively generous, but too hasty for disease to
accost or death to delay. For him they were interruptions, not abiding
sorrows.
"He knew nothing of rancour, remorse, regret; they conveyed much the
same to him as if he had been told to walk backwards and received
neither sympathy nor courtesy from him.
"He was an artist with the gift of admiration. He had a good eye and
could not buy an ugly or even moderately beautiful thing; but he was
no discoverer in art. Here I will add to make myself clear that I am
thinking of men like Frances Horner's father, old Mr. Graham,
[Footnote: Lady Horner, of Mells, Frome.] who discovered and

promoted Burne-Jones and Frederick Walker; or Lord Battersea, who
was the first to patronise Cecil Lawson; or my sister, Lucy Graham
Smith, who was a fine judge of every picture and recognised and
appreciated all schools of painting. My father's judgment was warped
by constantly comparing his own things with other people's.
"The pride of possession and proprietorship is a common and a human
one, but the real artist makes everything he admires his own: no one
can rob him of this; he sees value in unsigned pictures and promise in
unfinished ones; he not only discovers and interprets, but almost
creates beauty by the fire of his criticisms and the inwardness of his
preception. Papa