Music generally sets
me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on,
instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine
scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it
formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the
imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years
a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all
novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I
like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily--
against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my
taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some
person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all
the better.
This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes
is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels
(independently of any scientific facts which they may contain),
and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever
they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for
grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why
this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain
alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A
man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than
mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to
live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry
and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps
the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept
active through use.
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