By far the most admirable and impressive picture in this book appears to me to be that which the author has all unconsciously drawn of himself. It reveals once more that tragedy--the most profound, most common and most neglected of all the multitude of useless tragedies that our weak and wasteful civilization by sheer indifference permits--the tragedy of a richly gifted nature denied the opportunity of congenial self-expression. What by comparison is the tragedy of starvation, since so very many willingly starve, if haply they may find this opportunity? The author is an artist, a born artist. His natural place is in a world unknown and undreamed of by us children of an age commissioned to carry out the great idea of industrial and political development. He belongs by birthright in the eternal realm of divine impossibilities, of sublime and delightful inconsistencies. Greatly might he have fulfilled his destiny in music, in poetry, in painting had he been born at one of those periods when spiritual activity was all but universal, when spiritual ideas were popular and dominant, _volitantes per ora virum_, part of the very air one breathed--in the Greece of Pericles, the England of Elizabeth, or on the Tuscan hills at the time of the Florentine Renaissance! But this was not to be. An admirer, jealous of every possible qualification, reminds me that I should call him at least a philosophical artist; yes, but not by nature even that. The toga did not drop upon him readymade from a celestial loom. It was woven and fitted laboriously by his own hands. He sought philosophical consistency and found it and established himself in it; but only as part of the difficult general discipline of an alien life. What an iron discipline, and how thoroughly alien a life, stands revealed to the eye of poetic insight and the spirit of sympathetic delicacy, on every page of these memoirs. For the over-refined (as we say), the oversensitive soul of a born artist--think of the experience, think of the achievement! The very opposite of all that makes a politician, appraising politics always at their precise value, yet patiently spending all the formative years of his life in the debilitating air of politics for the sake of what he might indirectly accomplish. Not an executive, yet incessantly occupied with tedious details of administrative work, for the satisfaction of knowing them well done. Not a philosopher, yet laboriously making himself what Glanvil quaintly calls “one of those larger souls who have traveled the divers climates of opinion” until he acquired a social philosophy that should meet his own exacting demands.