Never was such a pourer of cold water on other people's enthusiasms. He cannot endure the profession that a man is moved by high motives. His annoyance, for example, with the "anti-opium" movement is not due to the fact that he supports the importation into China of Indian opium. Very commonly he does not. But the movement is an "agitation" (dreadful word!). It is "got up" by missionaries. It purports to be based on moral grounds, and he suspects everything that so purports. Not that he is not himself moved by moral considerations. Almost invariably he is. But he will never admit it for himself, and he deeply suspects it in others. The words "hypocrite," "humbug," "sentimentalist" spring readily to his lips. But let him work off his steam, sit quiet and wait, and you will find, often enough, that he has arrived at the same conclusion as the "sentimentalist"--only, of course, for quite different reasons! For intellect he has little use, except so far as it issues in practical results. He will forgive a man for being intelligent if he makes a fortune, but hardly otherwise. Still, he has a queer, half-contemptuous admiration for a definite intellectual accomplishment which he knows it is hard to acquire and is not sure he could acquire himself. That, for instance, is his attitude to those who know Chinese. A "sinologue," he will tell you, must be an imbecile, for no one but a fool would give so much time to a study so unprofitable. Still, in a way, he is proud of the sinologue--as a public school is proud of a boy so clever as to verge upon insanity, or a village is proud of the village idiot. Something of the same feeling, I sometimes think, underlies his respect for Shakspere. "If you want that kind of thing," he seems to say to the foreigner, "and it's the kind of thing you _would_ want, _we_ can do it, you see, better than you can!"
So with art. He is never a connoisseur, but he is often a collector. Partly, no doubt, because there is money in it, but that is a secondary consideration. Mainly because collecting and collectors appeal to his sporting instinct. His knowledge about his collection will be precise and definite, whether it be postage stamps or pictures. He will know all about it, except its æsthetic value. That he cannot know, for he cannot see it. He has the _flair_ of the dealer, not the perception of the amateur. And he does not know or believe that there is any distinction between them.