, but shell-shock had left him
with a heart that could not stand a strain of this kind, and all his own
fine courage could not help the surgeons in a losing fight. We are not
sorry for him--we learn that, not to be sorry for the dead. But for
ourselves? This terror is always so fresh, so unexampled. I had
telephoned to him to ask whether he would help me in a certain
theatrical enterprise. I was told by his servant that he was ill, but
one hears these things so often that one gave but little thought to it
beyond sending a telegram asking for news; and now this. Personal griefs
are of no public interest, but here is as sad a public loss as has
befallen us, if the world can measure truly, in our generation.

But it is not, I think, of our loss that we should speak now. These
desolations, strangely, have a way of bringing their own fortitude.
A few hours after hearing, without any warning, of Lovat Fraser's death,
I was walking among the English landscape that he loved so well, and I
felt there how poor and inadequate a thing death really was, how little
to be feared. This apparent intention to destroy a life and genius so
young, so admirable, and so rich in promise, seemed, for all the hurt,
in some way wholly to have failed. We all knew that, given health, the
next ten years would show a splendid volume of work from the new power
and understanding to which he had been coming in these later days. But
just as it seems to me not the occasion to lament our own loss, so does
it seem idle to speculate with regret upon what art may have lost by
this sudden stroke. It is, rather, well to be glad that so few years
have borne so abundantly. Not only is the work that Lovat Fraser has
left full in volume, it is decisive in character beyond all likelihood
in one of his years. Greatly as he would have added to our delight, and
wider as his influence would have grown, nothing he might have done
could have added to our knowledge of the kind of distinction that was
his and that will always mark his fame.

The man himself had a charm of unusual definition. One might go to his
studio at five o'clock and find him lumbering with his great frame among
a chaos of the rare and curious books that he loved, stacked pell-mell
on to the shelves, littered on tables and the floor, his clothes and
face and fingers streaked with paint. And then an hour or two later he
would come dressed ready for the theatre, an immaculate beau of the
'fifties, his to