pay himself with fine
feelings whether for mean action or slack inaction. He had an insatiable
zest for all experiences, not the pleasurable only, but including the
more harsh and biting--those that bring home to a man the pinch and
sting of existence as it is realised by the disinherited of the world,
and excluding only what he thought the prim, the conventional, the
dead-alive, and the cut-and-dry. On occasion the experimentalist and man
of adventure in him would enter into special partnership with the
moralist and man of conscience: he was prone to plunge into difficult
social passes and ethical dilemmas, which he might sometimes more wisely
have avoided, for the sake of trying to behave in them to the utmost
according to his own personal sense of the obligations of honour, duty,
and kindness. In yet another part of his being he cherished, as his
great countryman Scott had done before him, an intense underlying
longing for the life of action, danger and command. "Action, Colvin,
action," I remember his crying eagerly to me with his hand on my arm as
we lay basking for his health's sake in a boat off the scented shores of
the Cap Martin. Another time--this was on his way to a winter cure at
Davos--some friend had given him General Hamley's _Operations of
War_:--"in which," he writes to his father, "I am drowned a thousand
fathoms deep, and O that I had been a soldier is still my cry."
Fortunately, with all these ardent and divers instincts, there were
present two invaluable gifts besides: that of humour, which for all his
stress of being and vivid consciousness of self saved him from ever
seeing himself for long together out of a just proportion, and kept
wholesome laughter always ready at his lips; and that of a most tender
and loyal heart, which through all his experiments and agitations made
the law of kindness the one ruling law of his life. In the end, lack of
health determined his career, giving the chief part in his life to the
artist and man of imagination, and keeping the man of action a prisoner
in the sickroom until, by a singular turn of destiny, he was able to
wring a real prolonged and romantically successful adventure out of that
voyage to the Pacific which had been, in its origin, the last despairing
resource of the invalid.

Again, it was characteristic of this multiple personality that he never
seemed to be cramped like the rest of us, at any given time of life,
within the limits of his proper age, b