Yet it can be freely admitted that his work was not of the kind which was likely to appeal as a matter of course to ordinary men. It was, as has been already said, the outcome of his own temperament, and had from the first a specific character which was too personal to be wholly intelligible to people accustomed to look only at the surface of things. It must be remembered that he had naturally a very remarkable mind, and that he received an education which was quite unlike that usually given to men who adopt the artist's profession. He had a sound basis of book-knowledge, and was taught especially to study and understand the classics, but to this was added, by his prolonged residence abroad, an intimate insight into many things which never come within the view of the majority of men, or at best are only dealt with in later life when the receptivity of youth has become dulled. He was encouraged partly by his father's precepts, partly by circumstances, to analyse and investigate, to compare this and that phase of thought and form of expression, to seek for the reasons why there should be such marked differences between the methods of workers who all professed to be advocating the same principles. Superficial information could not, and did not, satisfy him; he had to get down to the foundation and to find out the causes for the results which were presented to him.
But of course when he came to build a system of art practice upon his early experiences, and to shape it by the aid of his analytical habit, he evolved something which most men could scarcely appraise at its full value. Therefore, his artistic purpose was persistently misunderstood and, it may be added, habitually misrepresented. His art was over the heads of his contemporaries because their tastes and sympathies had never been cultivated to his level, because their grosser preferences failed to find satisfaction in the purity of his idealism. He was absorbed always in the pursuit of beauty, which he had sought and found in many lands, and it was his earnest desire to give to his representations of this beauty a kind of unhuman perfection, passionless, perhaps, and cold, but exquisite always in its studied refinement. No hint of coarseness or sensuality ever crept into his pictures; it would be a strangely constituted mind indeed that could find in his work any suggestiveness, or anything to gratify the baser instincts of humanity. He kept aloof from the common things of existence, and lived in a self-created paradise to which the rest of mankind could hardly hope to gain admission.