He was now, in some measure, "a person of
means," and he made the habit of connoisseurship his hobby. He formed a
small collection of pictures, selecting works with, as he believed,
great care. The result could be seen long afterwards by those who
visited him in his final affluence, for they hung round the rooms of the
sumptuous flat in which he spent his old age and in which he died. His
taste, as far as one remembers, was for the Italian masters of the
decline, and whether he selected pictures with a good judgment must be
left for others to decide. Probably he shared with Shelley a fondness
for the Guercinos and the Guido Renis, whom we can now admire only in
defiance of Ruskin.
In April, 1879, it is understood, a story was told him of an incident in
the Danish courts, the adventure of a young married woman in one of the
small towns of Zealand, which set his thoughts running on a new dramatic
enterprise. He was still curiously irritated by contemplating, in his
mind's eye, the "respectable, estimable narrowmindedness and
worldliness" of social conditions in Norway, where there was no
aristocracy, and where a lower middle-class took the place of a
nobility, with, as he thought, sordid results.
Pages:
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171