on, from the pessimism that had
quailed under his pistol, he made himself a kind of fanatic
of the joy of life. He cut across all the associations
of serious-minded men. He was gay, but by no means careless.
His practical jokes were more in earnest than verbal ones.
Though not an optimist in the absurd sense of maintaining that
life is all beer and skittles, he did really seem to maintain
that beer and skittles are the most serious part of it.
`What is more immortal,' he would cry, `than love and war?
Type of all desire and joy--beer. Type of all battle
and conquest--skittles.'

"There was something in him of what the old world called
the solemnity of revels--when they spoke of `solemnizing'
a mere masquerade or wedding banquet. Nevertheless he was not
a mere pagan any more than he was a mere practical joker.
His eccentricities sprang from a static fact of faith,
in itself mystical, and even childlike and Christian.

"`I don't deny,' he said, `that there should be priests to remind
men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain
strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests,
called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.
The intellectuals among whom I moved were not even alive enough
to fear death. They hadn't enough blood in them to be cowards.
Until a pistol barrel was poked under their very noses they never
even knew they had been born. For ages looking up an eternal
perspective it might be true that life is a learning to die.
But for these little white rats it was just as true that death
was their only chance of learning to live.'

"His creed of wonder was Christian by this absolute test; that he felt
it continually slipping from himself as much as from others.
He had the same pistol for himself, as Brutus said of the dagger.
He continually ran preposterous risks of high precipice or headlong
speed to keep alive the mere conviction that he was alive.
He treasured up trivial and yet insane details that had once
reminded him of the awful subconscious reality. When the don
had hung on the stone gutter, the sight of his long dangling legs,
vibrating in the void like wings, somehow awoke the naked satire
of the old definition of man as a two-legged animal without feathers.
The wretched professor had been brought into peril by his head,
which he had so elaborately cultivated, and only saved
by his legs, which he had treated with coldness and neglect.
Smith could