made new friends, fought old enemies. I have lived, and life is wonderful.'

In his writing, as in his conversation, the kaleidoscope of his mind produced such surprising pictures abruptly succeeding one another, that I hesitate to give the most characteristic instances, for the reader has not the opportunity which his interlocutors had of learning by cross-examination how fully thought-out were trains of reasoning, which he suggested without developing them, or how real was the connexion in his mind between

things objectively poles apart. I will content myself with one-by no means among the strongest-which shows the official at the War Office indulging in feelings and conceits suggested by his surroundings. That office has had in the last twenty years many distinguished occupants-Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Mr. ArnoldForster, Lord Haldane, Colonel Seely, Lord Midleton, and others equally eminent. But it is safe to say that neither the old premises in Pall Mall nor the buildings in Whitehall ever inspired any of these men with the combination of theories and emotions to which the following letter gives expression.

'After a day spent in grappling with complicated detail, I find that nothing short of philosophy or poetry is of the least use to me. I tried a novel the other day, "The Open Question," and it aggravated me beyond belief. I want the very best and prefer it in a different form and remotely aloof from everyday life. I have bought a Latin Prayer Book-our Prayer Book, 2nd ed., 1574-and find the Psalms very stately and soothing. A little Latin goes a long way. But when your business consists in ploughing like a liner through seas of slipshod English, you need the very opposite: a dead language, clean-cut and frigid poetry, or abstract thought....

'I have been inside a good many machines; the Army, Irish Office, Colonial Expansion; Fleet Street; literary coteries, and now inside, and of, another office; and no doubt such experience affects me. The multiplicity of the parts defying philosophic comprehension and the dead weight of each dragging down individual energy, drive home the lesson that no individual, or race, or age, or movement embracing many nations and some centuries, is likely to give a decisive

cast to the direction of development or even to reconcile any considerable number of divergent forces. But this does not daunt me. I see the universal Flux; but I believe in the choric Dance. In some ways business is a capital exercise or drill. It gives you a number of occasions every day for doing the right thing in the right way. This is capital practice. But far from thinking that mere honest effort at complicated jobs would serve mankind as a substitute for philosophy, religion and art, I do not believe that the second-class clerks could work as they do if we had not all the abstract speculations of 3000 years behind us. We either draw inspiration ourselves, or else we imitate others who drew it, from the half-truths arrived at by lonely thinkers.

'But, my goodness! how much more of courage and compassion and patience and sincerity is needed if the world is to go any better than it has done! And what is to be done for the people who are outside the worlds of thought and of action? For the young lady who lost her temper last week because she was not invited [to a party], or for the officer who resigns his commission when his profession interferes with his shooting?'

All these extracts tell of the active, seething imagination of the man. But he could write of politics in a very concrete and practical vein. I must not, however, cite letters dealing with topics of acute political controversy which might provoke discussions that would distract attention from the real matter in hand. I will quote only the very characteristic concluding paragraphs of a long and closely reasoned letter on the attempts of 1906 at a compromise on the education question-attempts which he regarded as profoundly illogical.

'Let us quit all this hopeless, helpless dumb show of hypnotised Democracy going to its appointed doom of Bureaucracy and Cæsarism, now as ever, and everywherequod semper et ubique.

'Let us laugh! We ought to laugh. Surprise is the basis of laughter. And what can be more surprising than to see the leaders of Nonconformity in the House of Commons, bribed by Baronetcies, abrogating the Constitution, and laughing as well they may-at the spectacle of the Anglican Archbishop ramming Nonconformity down my throat with the butt end of his crozier? They laugh. Had I not better laugh,

too? "Taking it in good part" is, I believe, the classic phrase for acquiescing in comic turpitude.

'But I have not quitted this grim subject. I must, or I shall forget to laugh, and increase the merriment of others by getting angry. That would be absurd, when neither Anglican, nor Catholic, nor Educationalist, nor Unionist, are willing to think of anything but their Christmas holidays.'

A word must be said of Wyndham's interest in religious subjects which, in later years, was marked. His interest in the education question was indeed but one instance of this. The early cult of beauty which was natural to his artist's nature had in it, perhaps, a touch of paganism. Later on, the beauty of Catholic ideals drew him. He wrote well and even profoundly on the practical necessity of dogma in order to safeguard religion.

The following defence of the traditionary dogmatic formula of Christianity, on lines not inconsistent with liberal thought, is surely a remarkable piece of tersely expressed reasoning.

'I have read X. and should like to discuss him with you. He writes with lucidity and persuasion. But there is a third position between his and Sabatier's. A man may accept Sabatier's view that the relation of dogma to religion is best illustrated by the relation of language to thought, and may, yet, attach an importance to dogma so great as to justify him in accepting a convinced believer's attitude towards dogma as the only adequate recognition of the magnitude of that importance. Even in literature we decline to bring Shakespeare or Chaucer "up to date": we prefer, if we can, to read Dante or Homer, however haltingly, in their own Tuscan and Greek. I heard an interesting sermon by Adderley to-day, in which he justified the acceptance of the "Real Presence" and the rejection of "transubstantiation." It would have made a good point of departure for a symposium. His point was that the doctrine of Transubstantiation was only an explanation of the dogma of the Real Presence given, necessarily, in the terms of philosophy then current but now obsolete. Adderley would no doubt argue that, in such a case, the relation of dogma to religion may not only be illustrated by the relation of language to thought, but that it actually is more a question of language than of belief. Carrying that backwards to Sabatier's extreme position, my supporter of a "tertium quid"

'would handle the Incarnation on similar lines. He would say that in the birth of Our Lord there was a manifestation of Divinity on Earth so momentous and so singular as to find an adequate, though no doubt inaccurate expression, only in the doctrine of the Incarnation. No other form of thought would give him a sufficiently splendid symbol, he would therefore accept that form of thought whilst admitting that in thought and still more, of course, in language it partook of human thought and human language belonging to the age in which it was conceived and to the ages during which it was crystallised. But, just because he makes that philosophic concession, he could and would see much gain in keeping to the form both of thought and language and much risk in any ephemeral attempt to re-think and re-write the symbol.'

Some of the opponents of dogma amused him, as he shows in the following note of 1906:

'I have a letter before me from a man who holds that dogmatic teaching of the Christian or any other religion is immaterial. He would teach the religion of citizenship. turns out to be the teaching of boys not to spit in public places.'

This

There were seasons when Catholic ideals strongly affected his life, and he welcomed the Catholic revival in the Church of England; but perhaps his sympathies in this matter somewhat outstripped his convictions.

There were very noble and winning traits in a character not wholly consistent. Though intensely ambitious, he had that devotion to great aims for their own sake which deliberately sacrifices ambition. If going to Ireland satisfied his ambition, his line of action after he was installed went at times in the teeth of his own interests. He studied before all things what was best, not for himself, but for the country. He refused to adopt opportunist courses which would have benefited him personally and averted disaster. He declined, as has been said, offers of official promotion, preferring what only his sanguine and absorbing devotion to the task he had set himself prevented his seeing to be a forlorn hope.

And when some of those, whom the glamour of his advocacy had at first won, realised that his later schemes must be disowned, and he felt himself to be left almost

alone, no word of reproach was ever heard from him. He sadly quoted to one, near to him by friendship and relationship, Chaucer's lines:

'Let not this wretched woe your herté grieve

But manly set the world in six and seven,

And if thou die a martyr, go to Heaven.'

He was indeed loyal in his friendships, and would do impulsive things for his friends such as are done by the Don Quixotes of the world, but very seldom by those whose lot is cast in the cold calculating atmosphere of public life. Life in the great world is apt to wear off such finer promptings. They are keen in many a boy. Wyndham was something of a boy to the end. His boyish love of the glittering toys of life made him enjoy the glamour of the great world; but the same youthfulness kept untarnished much of the generous and uncalculating spirit which that world is apt to kill.

This generosity, while it was graceful in his friendships, might even verge on the heroic in its other aspect of which I have just spoken-his devotion to public causes. He could lose himself in his cause. And his heart would be so much set on its success that defeat became tragic. Here I return to the note I touched at starting the element of real greatness revealed mainly in his failures. The average man of the world held it to show a want of the tough fibre of a work-a-day statesman that he nearly broke his heart when he had finally to give up his Irish schemes. Many of his critics saw no more than this, and were incapable of understanding that Wyndham's unhappiness was largely the result of a depth of conviction and a concentrated devotion by which alone the very greatest things are done. In a lesser degree his keen sense of inevitable consequences and his genuine patriotism made him suffer acutely in other public defeats-notably in August 1911, when the Parliament Bill was passed. Weeks of ungrudging labour with results that made him intensely sanguine were succeeded by the rebuff of August 10th. To a mechanical mind the depth of his disappointment at that time might seem extravagant. But it stood for a fine quality of insight and a public spirit which is especially rare in our own