Perhaps the finest definition of his philosophy of life may be found in an essay in _The Day’s Burden_. “A wise man soon grows disillusioned of disillusionment. The first lilac freshness of life will indeed never return. The graves are sealed, and no hand will open them to give us back dead comrades or dead dreams. As we look out on the burdened march of humanity, as we look in on the leashed but straining passions of our unpurified hearts, we can but bow our heads and accept the discipline of pessimism. Bricriu must have his hour as well as Cuchullin. But the cynical mood is one that can be resisted. Cynicism, however exercisable in literature, is in life the last treachery, the irredeemable defeat.... But we must continue loyal to the instinct which makes us hope much, we must believe in all the Utopias.” Pessimism is indeed written on his banner, but it is a pessimism which achieves. “Is not the whole Christian conception of life rooted in pessimism,” he argues, “as becomes a philosophy expressive of a world in which the ideal can never quite overcome the crumbling incoherence of matter? May we not say of all good causes what Arnold said only of the proud and defeated Celts: ‘They always went down to battle, but they always fell’!” There is no need to comment on him as a man of letters. A master of exquisite prose, he had in perfection what he himself calls “the incommunicable gift of phrase” and “the avid intellect which must needs think out of things everything to be found in them.” What he wrote of Anatole France, might fittingly be applied to himself. “A pessimism, stabbed and gashed with the radiance of epigrams as a thunder-cloud is stabbed by lightning is a type of spiritual life far from contemptible. A reasonable sadness, chastened by the music of consummate prose is an attitude and an achievement, that will help many men to bear with more resignation the burden of our century.” His defence of the use of the epigram and its purpose is vigorous and arresting: “The epigrammatist, too, and the whole tribe of image-makers dwell under a disfavour far too austere. We must distinguish. There is in such images an earned and an unearned increment of applause. The sudden, vast, dazzling, and deep-shadowed view of traversed altitudes that breaks on the vision of a climber, who, after long effort, has reached the mountain-top, is not to be grudged him. And the image that closes up in a little room the infinite riches of an argument carefully pursued is not only legitimate but admirable.”