There are men with a social gift who must dominate their company, expecting others to woo them. This was not my father's way. Rather would he lure you on till you believed, not in him, about which he did not care, but in your own self. It was he who wooed his company not they him. Naturally I found his conversation enthralling. His country neighbours round about and his own friends & relations, would complain that he used strange words; and so he did, and for that reason I was the more pleased. A new word was to him, as to me, a pearl of discovery, fished up out of some strange book he had been reading, and we would enjoy it together. My mind often goes back into that wide kitchen, and again I sit with him beside the fire, a little table for his tobacco and whiskey at his side and on it a single candle throwing a feeble light. The kitchen is the best room in the house. To compare it with a drawing-room is to remember the difference between a fishing lugger built and rigged and shaped for storm and angry sea, and a spic and span yacht which never leaves the harbour except in the summer time when the seas are safe and the winds gentle.
If the sweet-tempered men keep romance alive, it is the cross-tempered, contentious men without affection who grub into the secret places to find the poison and infection of ugliness. These people desire to destroy everywhere the vision of happiness, and to make war on its prophets and champions. Among such people my father was silent and helpless. I think I am more venturesome.
Everybody was happy in Shakespeare's time. When the French Revolution had spent its force, and Napoleon was at St. Helena, unhappiness was in Paris, and from out of its thick cloud came the realistic wave. Of course I know that there are cheerful people who adore ugliness. Such people have so much animal spirit that they are like many schoolboys who want to frighten their maiden aunt, but ugliness of the intense and passionate kind comes out of the entrails of the angry and the unhappy.
When cheerful artists revel in the ugly what they write or paint is purely mechanical, but whether an artist has the genuine passion and can't help himself, or is only pretending to it, such men are a weariness to any man with any tincture of a romantic imagination. I have seen drawings & read prose done with an appetite for the ugly that reminded me of the dogs that licked the sores of Lazarus.