His library, he told me, among other
things included, first and f ore-most, a complete Byron. Next was a
complete Shakespeare; also a complete Browning in one volume. A full
hall-dozen he had in the forecastle of Renan, a stray volume of
Lecky, Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man, several of Carlyle, and
eight or ten of Zola. Zola he swore by, though Anatole France was a
prime favourite.
He might be mad, was my revised judgment, but he was most differently
mad from any madman I had ever encountered. I talked on with him
about books and bookmen. He was most universal and particular. He
liked O. Henry. George Moore was a cad and a four--flusher. Edgar
Saltus' Anatomy of Negation was profounder than Kant. Maeterlinck
was a mystic frump. Emerson was a charlatan. Ibsen's Ghosts was the
stuff, though Ibsen was a bourgeois lickspittler. Heine was the real
goods. He preferred Flaubert to de Maupassant, and Turgenieff to
Tolstoy; but Gorky was the best of the Russian boiling. John
Masefield knew what he was writing about, and Joseph Conrad was
living too fat to turn out the stuff he first turned out.
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